How to Plan Your Email Marketing Strategy for 2024

Introduction

An email marketing strategy requires considerable planning and foresight. If you spend enough time planning your email marketing strategy, you can achieve your goals more efficiently and create the best possible campaigns.

Email marketing remains a potent tool for businesses of all sizes. To maximize its impact in 2024, a well-structured strategy is essential. Let's break down the key steps:

1. Define Your Goals and Audience

Clear Objectives: Determine what you want to achieve with your email campaigns (e.g., increased sales, lead generation, customer retention).
Deep Audience Understanding: Create detailed customer personas to tailor your messaging effectively.

2. Build a Robust Email List

Quality Over Quantity: Focus on acquiring engaged subscribers rather than just numbers.
Multiple Acquisition Channels: Utilize various methods like website forms, social media, and lead magnets.
Data Hygiene: Regularly clean your list to maintain deliverability.

3. Craft Compelling Content

Value Proposition: Provide content that genuinely benefits your audience.
Personalization: Tailor content to individual preferences and behaviors.
Visual Appeal: Use high-quality images and engaging design.
Mobile Optimization: Ensure emails are easily readable on mobile devices.

4. Leverage Automation

Welcome Emails: Greet new subscribers warmly and provide value.
Abandoned Cart Reminders: Recover lost sales.
Post-Purchase Follow-Ups: Build customer loyalty and encourage repeat business.
Personalized Recommendations: Offer relevant products or services based on purchase history.

5. Master Segmentation

Divide and Conquer: Segment your audience based on demographics, behavior, or preferences.
Targeted Campaigns: Deliver relevant content to specific segments.

6. Optimize for Mobile

Responsive Design: Ensure emails display correctly on all devices.
Short and Sweet: Keep content concise due to smaller screens.
Large Buttons: Make calls to action easy to tap.

7. Track and Analyze

Key Metrics: Monitor open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and other relevant data.
A/B Testing: Experiment with different subject lines, content, and designs.
Continuous Improvement: Use data to refine your strategy.

8. Embrace Emerging Trends

Interactive Emails: Enhance engagement with interactive elements.
AI-Powered Personalization: Utilize AI to deliver highly personalized experiences.
Video Content: Incorporate video for better storytelling.

9. Prioritize Deliverability

Email Authentication: Implement SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
Content Relevance: Avoid spam triggers and maintain high engagement rates.
List Hygiene: Regularly clean your list to remove invalid emails.

10. Compliance and Privacy

GDPR and CCPA: Adhere to data protection regulations.
Clear Opt-Out Options: Provide easy ways for subscribers to unsubscribe.

This guide will tell you everything you need to consider when planning your campaign. You will also receive a detailed example of an email marketing campaign strategy in action, as well as a questionnaire that will help you make the most of your marketing efforts.

Every Successful Email Marketing Strategy Starts with a Plan

How can you create a useful messaging policy? You should start with more planning in advance. Ask the following questions:

What is the purpose of an email investment? What trading results would you like to see?

Who are the people who will read it?

What does this audience expect?

What will determine the "success" of this project?

Before you start developing emails or think about how to optimize your topics, you should answer these questions. You don't want to receive a beautifully designed email that can only be seen with the email filtering software.

To get noticed, you must first create effective emails. And for this we will tell you the principles that you need to use when planning an effective email marketing strategy for 2022.

A Detailed Example of an Email Marketing Campaign Strategy

We start with the email strategy of the modern Henchperson magazine.

Okay, we made it up. But stay tuned, because this example will help you determine the strategy of your next campaign.

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Imagine that there is a magazine for today's busy supervillain. This supervillain has no time for the basic maintenance of the death trap. They do not have time to unite the owners, because their volcanic cave does not comply with the Code""

Therefore, they hire a hired servant. And these minions must be on the road to constant improvement if they want to do everything that the minion needs to do: inaccurately shoot a firearm at James Bond, fill the submarine with gas and laugh at the right time.

Now imagine that you are developing an email marketing strategy for the modern magazine Henchperson. You know your demographic group: a busy person. But that's all you know yet. You can use the following template to ask questions about an email marketing strategy that will help inform you about everything you do:

The email marketing strategy of the modern Henchman magazine

Audience: Who are you sending these emails to ?

Current subscribers of the print magazine

People who have subscribed to emails through a sign-up form or landing page on your website

. customers who have purchased from us on our website

What is the main reason for sending these emails?

Increase sales of our modern Henchman product line by encouraging people to buy for the first time and turning readers into regular buyers

Which emails do you want to send?

Customer Newsletter

Subscription Reminders

Invoices and purchase receipts

Promotional Emails

E-mail correspondence

Welcome letter

What content do you want to send ?

How often will you send emails?

The newsletter is sent once a month along with other reminders and notifications as needed

Do you have an existing visual design that you want the email to match?

Yes, the website is on modernhenchman.com

Do you have examples of email marketing campaign strategies that you like?

Letters about new Amazon products

Baskin-Robbins Customer Loyalty Emails

This is a good start. Let's say you realized that you need to remain relevant to your current subscribers and former buyers. After all, it is the people who are most likely to buy at home in the future. Therefore, it is a very cost-effective way to send an email newsletter or follow-up offer to customers once or twice a month to stay connected.

It also keeps you in the minds of your customers and ensures that when you need a gel jet or an exploding hat, modernhenchperson.com is your first stop.

Now that we have the memory, we can start figuring out what needs to be done to complete the project. The first step is to determine in more detail what a successful project will look like.

How to Set Email Marketing Goals

With a brief summary behind you, it's time to set goals. What are your indicators of a successful email marketing program?

Success begins with a clear goal since it is no less important for an electronic newsletter than for any other digital marketing tactic.

By taking your answers from the original memory, you can reformulate them in the form of measurable goals. These goals must also be as accurate as possible.

In this way, you want to increase the sale of subscribers for printing and convert new customers from email-only subscribers to active ones. It is a good start, but it is advisable to try to set more specific goals.

For example, what exactly do you mean by "increase in sales"? Is it enough to have another sale? This may sound ridiculous, but there are certain products and services where a whole year of email campaign strategy can be paid for a single sale.

For example, selling consulting services for thousands of dollars for a single commitment is significantly different from selling Web 2.0 gradient stickers for one dollar per box. They must be detailed and specific in order to set useful goals.

If you are not sure about the dollar amount, you can also indicate your goals using the links included in the email in terms of the number of visitors coming to your site. If you know that 1.8% of visits to a site go on sale, information about how many people visit the site by e-mail can be converted into cash value.

For modern minions, we could suggest this basic goal: to generate at least 400 million sales directly from newsletter subscribers within the first week after sending each email.

Otherwise, you may not have a goal that is directly related to financial return. For some companies, the reader's response may be exactly what they want to achieve. Here are some more examples of goals you might consider:

Restoring direct contact with 5 previous customers

40% of subscribers open emails

20% of subscribers switch to at least one link

30 people visit this special page on the site

These goals can be easily measured so that you can determine when you have achieved them. Sometimes it will be impossible. For example, it can take years for a customer to commit to buying a new warehouse planning system or a new mainframe installation. Measurable goals in these cases may concern the maintenance of a relationship, the measure being the customer's email responses.

This process is not limited to achieving goals. It's also meant to encourage you to think about why you're sending emails first. Emails with a specific purpose and direction are the ones that stand out, and the rest is just noise cluttering the mailboxes.

Email Measurements: How we will Measure Success

Once you have one or more goals, you need to set up tools or processes to see if those goals have been met. This can be sales data from a specific department, reports from your email provider, or website analytics.

If you use special software (internal or external) to send e-mail, then many of these actions can be provided to you as part of the package. The types of digits you can expect to be able to track are:

The initial prices

How many people who have received an email have you read? This figure is calculated by tracking the uploading of tracking images within each email. However, many email clients do not upload images by default, so not all openings can be saved. Similarly, some email clients only display plain text without uploaded images.

*Note: Although opening rates can still be a significant indicator, Apple's email privacy feature makes them increasingly unreliable. Instead of relying on initial rates to measure success, we recommend that you refer to other participation indicators such as those listed below.

Click-through Rate (CTR)

How many people who received the email actually clicked on the link? Typically, email delivery services redirect each link through their own tracking service to log these clicks.

Pass

How many people have actually used the "Send to a friend" feature to forward an email? (We assume that your software fulfills this function.)

Logout

How many people have decided to cancel other emails using the cancellation system built into the software?

Conversion Rate

How many people who clicked on it actually bought a trial version, downloaded it or performed some other action that you can follow? Software such as Google Analytics can be used to log these activities and link them to specific sources, including your email campaigns.

The most important measure is not the gross indicators themselves, but the change of these metrics from campaign to campaign (also called a trend). After sending each campaign, we will also change the content and design of the email marketing strategy on the day of the week and the time of day you send the emails. Historical metrics will quickly let you know if your changes were successful or not.

You have reached a point where you have goals for your email campaign strategy and you know how to know if we have achieved those goals. Only now you should start creating a plan for the HTML email itself.

Emails are created using the same technologies as websites: HTML and CSS. However, there are big differences in what makes the design suitable for a messaging policy.

Content Strategy: What are you going to send them ?

It's tempting for web designers to think of HTML emails as a one-page website. After all, it's just HTML and CSS. In addition, a large number of people will view your mail in a web browser.

This is all true. But websites and emails are two different types of media. Just as print designers have had to get used to the unique limitations and possibilities of the Internet, web designers working with email also have to adapt their thinking.

Optimizing your content for the appropriate medium can often turn good emails into good ones.

Reminder: An email is not a website

People tend to think of websites as online storefronts. People actively visit our website, be it directly, through a search or through a link. When a visitor visits your site, he usually already has an idea of what he expects to find. Visually, the site occupies a full browser window.

An email is a different case. Your inbox is more like your home than a shop window. Emails come to you without action. When you arrive, the visible area of the email can only be a fraction of the size of the web browser window.

Take a look at the typical messaging software below:

Your inbox is more like your home than a shop window. Emails come to you without action.

Note that this design of Huawei's email campaign strategy is formatted specifically for mobile users. However, it also looks great on the desktop.

The actual e-mail takes up only a small percentage of the space. It is surrounded by other objects competing for attention. Folders, notes and other emails struggle to be noticed.

You should also keep in mind that at least half of all subscribers will read emails on their mobile devices. This affects the way you design our emails and the way you write our content. As designers, we must respect the fact that our readers have allowed us to invade their personal space.

If readers are not faithful jealousies of the "zero mailbox", then our e-mail will be another item on the long list that interrupts your real work. Now they ask you to pay attention to your emails and, as a rule, take action. In return, they owe you an email that does not take longer than necessary, is easy to read and really useful. It's a simple equation: deliver content that's worth it.

Before we get into the visual aspects of HTML email design, you need to know what content you are going to use. This will help you in all other aspects of your design.

Reuse of content is allowed

While you may think that repeating the content of a blog or website is a deception, the reality is that most newsletter subscribers rarely visit the site unless they commit to a specific transaction. The latest statistics show that more than 90% of Internet users still do not understand what RSS is, let alone how to use it to track sites.

Even at Campaign Monitor, where customers have mostly experienced internet marketers, we get a lot more responses from our email campaigns than from our blog posts. Reusing website materials is a wise decision and can save a lot of time.

At this point, you only need representative content on which you can build your design. Create an incorrect sample problem with the content of your site.

Lorem Ipsum

Avoid using Lorem ipsum text as a fill, even though this is common in web design. Too many emails (and too many websites) have been designed with placeholders that have proven to be completely different in length, style and shape compared to real content. The design then had to be further developed long before it had to be further developed.

This nonprofit uses advanced tools and automation to create more emails - and more time.

CASE STUDY

This nonprofit uses advanced tools and automation to create more emails - and more time.

Learn how

Okay, let's get down to business here. And by business, I mean creating an email marketing strategy for a fictional henchman magazine.

You have a content list for the modern Henchperson newsletter to develop an email content marketing strategy:

information about the recommended product of the month

teasers for stories in the magazine

link to send an email to a friend

Then you need a way to prioritize and narrow down this list. A simple way is to ask another question: "What is the only action you want your reader to take after reading the email?”

Imagine that the desired action is that" the reader clicks on a button to learn more about our recommended product" when he receives a regular monthly email.

And you may have a favorite side effect for readers, such as sending a response, visiting a specific page, or forwarding an email. You can proceed to the selection of perhaps two or three desired actions, but no more, because too many possible options can paralyze the reader to do nothing at all.

Now you can categorize your content according to what best supports the desired action. You have to ask yourself: what will be the most consistent with our overall goals of the email campaign strategy?

A modern employee can get such a list of priorities:

information about the recommended product of the month (this directly supports our main promotion)

recommended article (building our knowledge reputation)

link to send an email to a friend

teasers for other stories

Create a newsletter plan with this list. Create a structure that can guide you from edit to edit. Based on subscribers' responses, you can change this over time, but you should always keep an eye on your goals.

Our last step before moving on to the visual design stage is to collect all the content of the first email. It can sometimes take a while, but for a modern assistant, we can get the bulk of the content of a typical problem on a website that has an archive of articles and complete product descriptions.

Questions and Answers about Email Marketing

Before we're done, let's take a look at some common email questions at the first launch.

How long should an email take?

As short as possible, but useful. Some companies send very long and complex materials by e-mail, but this is rare. A typical mailbox is already extremely full, so you don't want to contribute to the problem. Sign up, send your message and leave it.

The current industry standard of an email marketing strategy is 20 lines of text or 200 words, but don't think of it as a hard and fast rule, as it depends entirely on the purpose of the email.

If you're browsing several thousand newsletters for Campaign Monitor, the typical length of a high-content newsletter (as opposed to an invitation or a simple notification) is worth two or three screens. This means that you will have to mess around with your font size and the number of copies. See what works — there is no "same size" here.

As always, think about your audience, because their needs or expectations may be different.

Should I post the full articles in an email or just teasers and links to the site?

If you can present your point of view in several paragraphs, you can save your readers time by giving them everything they need without having to click on a link.

Also, for each email, think about your goals. What actions do readers want to take? If the goal is to publish them on your site, it would be advisable to write a short teaser (2-3 suggestions) and encourage readers to follow the link. A summary (without spoilers) will help convince you that it is worth clicking on the link.

For example, if your goal is to get readers to sign up for an event, you can simply use links with your pictures and headlines. In this case, they use links to give credibility to the final actions that they want readers to take, rather than using articles themselves, such as CTA.

This event email contains a basic call to action (an RSVP button) as well as support links to learn more about the moderators. You can follow this strategy when creating an email campaign strategy for healthy eating, parenting products, electronics and more.