How To Brainstorm Your Email Marketing Strategy

brainstorm your email marketing strategy

You can’t just create an email campaign and run with it. This strategy creates a very poor return on your efforts and the disjointed campaign would likely lose you subscribers as well as revenue. Instead, you need to develop a long-term plan that can give you, your campaigns and subscribers direction.

But how do you brainstorm an email marketing strategy? Here are some important steps in the development of campaigns you need to follow in order to get the best results.

1. Look At What Is Important For Your Business To Sell

The first thing to look at is what is important for your business to sell. Is there a product that performs better than others, especially online or via email? This is important because you need to know what direction you want to take your campaigns in.

You also need to know the price point and the main customer demographics. This information can determine how many touchpoints you need to create a sale. Generally speaking, the higher the ticket price for the product, the longer the campaign you need.

Research has also found that 50% of online sales take between five and twelve touchpoints to create a sale.

2. Determine What Points You Want To Get Across In Your Sales Pitch

When it comes to selling, you need to convince customers about the benefits of your solutions and the potential to solve pain points with the customers. This means you need to consider your product’s main users and what pain points they have and how your product can help them.

This creates you a long list of points that you want to get across with your email marketing campaign. These should be listed down and developed into stories. You can use current customer testimonials as a way to demonstrate your points.

3. Think About The Sales Process

Next you need to know more about your sales process and how your email marketing will fit into that process. For instance, will your emails lead directly to a product page that your subscribers can purchase from? Or do you need a way to qualify subscribers for purchasing that can be used by sales teams to complete sales?

When you’re building an email marketing campaign, this is an important point. Setting your campaign the right way will mean better results and less wasted time for both you and your customers.

4. Develop Timings For Your Campaigns

The next most important part of the brainstorming session is to develop timings for your campaigns. Your audience is always going to be different from another brands. Therefore, you should not read too much into when customers are online for your business.

However that doesn’t mean that your company doesn’t have an ideal time to send out campaigns. You need to know this. And you also need to determine how frequently you should be sending content to your audience. Too often, and you can alienate your subscribers and reduce the number on the list, while too few emails can mean that potential customers forget about your branding.

5. Sit Down With A Team And Develop Content

Don’t let emails be developed on the fly. Create a pre-constructed campaign that lasts a long time. This could be an auto-responder list or just a standard campaign you’re prepared. What is important is that several people contribute. It allows for greater depths of creativity and better results when those with different opinions work together on marketing campaigns.

At the same time, you can be sure that everyone knows what is going on, so they aren’t surprised when campaigns do go out.

Conclusion

Build your next campaign in advance and start with a brainstorming session. These tips will help you get the most out of your campaign and see revenue and profit growth.

Do you brainstorm email marketing campaigns? What tips do you have?

Let us know in the comments below.

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5 Things You Need Less Of To Improve Open Rates

What do you need to lose to improve open rates?

Your email campaign open rate is an important metric. The higher the open rate, the more people that are reading your campaigns and therefore, the greater revenue you can generate. However, there are several elements that can actually prevent you from having high open rates. By reducing some aspects within your campaign, you can actually improve open rates.

A higher open rate will also validate you as a sender. Therefore, if you can maintain high open rates, then your email domain will be whitelisted by email servers and this prevents your email from being sent into spam folders.

So, here are some of the things you can reduce in your email campaigns that can help you improve your open rates.

1. Subject Line Length

The first thing you should look at is the length of your subject lines. While they’ve got to include enough information to personalise, provide value and include an offer, the subject should also be short.

More than half of all emails are now opened on mobile devices and these have fewer spaces for letters. Therefore, if you have a subject line that is more than 41 characters then you’re likely to have part of the subject missing to audiences. This will devalue your subject line and reduce your open rate.

2. Spam Words

There are nearly 500 words that are considered spam by filters embedded in email servers. If you have these spam words inserted into the subject line or throughout the copy of your email, then you will have a hard time avoiding the spam folder in your subscriber’s email accounts. You might even have some hard bounces that will further impact your email server’s reputation.

Note that spam words being exempt from the email subject line isn’t the only requirement here. You must make sure that you limit their use within the copy of the email as many filters will assess the quality of the content now as well as the subject line.

3. Images Within The Copy Of The Email

There are many ways that images embedded within the email can reduce your open rates. Firstly, too many images might get flagged up by email filters. Secondly, images consume more memory than simple text. So when readers are on the move, it can take longer for people to open emails with lots of images.

When you do need to have images within an email, try to reduce the memory they require by using image optimisation tools like RIOT. These free tools will reduce the size of the images and convert them into different formats that make it easier and quicker for subscribers to view.

4. The Number Of People On A Send List

You’re never really looking to increase the number of people opening an email, you’re always looking at increasing the percentage of people who open an email in a campaign. This might seem the same, but they aren’t. There are many different people who reside on your email marketing list. They are all at different parts of the purchasing journey or are interested in different products.

Sending emails that aren’t relevant to people is not going to have them open the mail. Therefore, you need to segment your list so that campaigns are sent to the right people. This might mean you’re sending more emails out, but each campaign is to fewer, but more relevant people.

You should also look at cleansing your list every so often so those that haven’t responded to your campaigns, or have hard or soft bounced are removed from your list.

5. Number Of Emails Sent

If you send out emails too frequently you can put subscribers off from reading your emails. Some industries like coupon sites and job sites that send emails out every day experience very low open rates.

Instead you need to find the right sending frequency for your list. It is different for each industry and even demographic, so you might need to do some A/B testing on this tactic.

Get More Opens Through Smarter Email Campaigning

Your email list is valuable. Don’t waste that by limiting your potential results from campaigns. Ensure you’re leaving the right things out of your email content and subject line that can reduce your campaign’s open rates.

What is your open rate? What will you try to improve your open rate?

Let us know in the comments below.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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