Stephanie Donelson

Many marketers have a strong love for one marketing tactic over others and one fun tactic to fall in love with is email marketing. 

While email marketing comes with its own challenges and opportunities, it’s a consistent high-performer when done right and deserves all the love and attention it can get. 

It especially needs attention as there are a lot of things to manage with email marketing, like:

• Subscriber lists
• Subscription forms and landing pages
• Email design
• Writing copy and creating images
• Testing emails and links
• A/B testing email content
• Scheduling emails and setting up automated campaigns
• Analysis of results

Whew! That’s a lot of moving parts to email marketing and each needs attention to be done well. It’s easy to see why many marketers want to treat email marketing as a “set it and forget it” tactic. 

But email marketing shouldn’t be treated that way. Emails need your devotion and they need to be cared for if you want them to drive the right results.

If your email marketing strategy needs some love (and don’t we all with Valentine’s Day coming up?), check out these seven ways to fall back in love with your email marketing strategy!

7 steps to refresh your email marketing strategy

1. Set new goals

Take a moment to think about why you’re setting aside time, resources, and budget toward email marketing. Your reason should be more than, “because we have to.” Maybe you use email to prove your brand’s long-term value. Maybe you use email to drive repeat purchases or sales. There’s really no wrong reason to use email marketing besides doing it because everyone else is.

Tie your why to new email marketing goals for 2021. These could be as simple as:

• Increasing the number of subscribers
• Decreasing the number of unsubscribes, spam, or bounce rates
• Increasing open rates
• Increasing click-through rates
• Increasing conversions or ROI

2. Review what you have & identify areas of opportunity

What types of emails are you currently sending? 

Most email marketers send the following types of emails:

• Confirmation or thank you emails
• Newsletters or curated content
• Business news
• Product announcements or launches
• Offers, sales, or promotional emails
• Upsell emails
• Abandoned cart emails
• Lead nurture drip campaigns or a welcome series
• Milestone emails, like anniversaries or happy birthday emails
• Review or customer survey requests

Are you sending enough or are you bombarding people’s inboxes? Take inventory of your current email setup including drip campaigns, regularly scheduled emails, and one-off emails. You might also want to dive into analytics and see which of your emails are performing the best to focus your efforts on emails that need the most love.

You might identify that it’s time to update the email design, swap out content or links, or even add or subtract emails from a drip campaign.

This is a good opportunity to do some investigative work and see how your email marketing strategy compares to your competition to identify areas of opportunity of how you can leverage email better with your customers and prospects. 

3. Review your target audience & segmentation

It’s never a wrong time to make sure you’re targeting the right audience and sending them the right messages.

Start by creating the profile of your target audience:

• Who are our customers?
• What problems are they experiencing or what solutions are they searching for?
• How are they evaluating and purchasing solutions?
• What do we provide that our competition doesn’t?

By understanding their needs and content that’ll move them further along in their journey, you can customize your emails to that end as well as make sure you’re sending relevant emails to the right audiences. If you run a clothing boutique, you probably wouldn’t want to send your male customers an email about a flash sale on women’s shoes. 

Take a look at your form fields to make sure you’re collecting the right information to properly segment your email lists, like gender or industry, or even area of interest. Be careful to balance out segmentation needs with your customers’ time by not asking for too much information right away.

Most customers will quit or abandon a gated piece of content if you’re asking for more than a few key pieces of info like:

• Name
• Email
• Company

 Use progressive profiling techniques to collect more relevant data the more a prospect or customer interacts with you. The more they click on your emails or read your content, you can start pushing form fields that ask for:

• Phone number
• Job role
• Are they a decision maker or influencer?
• Timeline to purchase
• Expected purchase amount

4. Improve your list-building opportunities

Now that you’ve refined your forms, are there opportunities to collect more email addresses for your lists?

There are many ways to build your email subscriber lists:

• Pop up forms
• Gated content
• Webinar sign-up
• Sign-up forms in the header or footer of your website
• Social media CTAs or posts
• Auto-enroll during check-out
• Event enrollment

Are you maximizing your list-building opportunities? Where else can you direct people to sign up for your emails? Take a look at your website and owned social media channels or sponsored content to see if you can easily add a form.

5. Refine your email schedule

With the impact of COVID-19, we’ve seen a big shift in the workday and people’s schedules as most adapted to working from home and that means it might be time to take a closer look at the scheduling of your emails to make sure they’re still being sent on the right day at the right time. 

You might even find weekend sends or typically off-days are now performing well for your brand. 

You should also calendar out all the emails you send, from drip campaigns to newsletters, to make sure you’re not overloading your customers with emails. You might be surprised when you see it laid out this way just how many emails you’re sending. 

6. Run new A/B tests

A/B testing lets you swap out certain parts of your email, like subject line or a CTA, to see which gets more engagement from your audience. 

A/B tests can be run on:

• Subject line
• CTA (calls to action)
• Images
• Headlines
• Email copy
• Email design

These tests can help you learn what resonates with your email subscribers and use that information to create better emails for your specific audience. By understanding what they like and engage with, you can make sure every single email meets their needs. 

You could even do your own manual testing on send times and days to help you figure out your email schedule.

7. Make reporting easier

While the majority of email systems create reports for you regarding every email campaign’s performance, you might want to create your own report and dedicate time each month to tracking certain metrics over time. 

The most commonly tracked email metrics include:

• Email opens: The percentage of emails that were opened compared to the number of emails sent
• Unsubscribes: How many people unsubscribed from your lists due to this email
• Click-through rate: How many people clicked on links in your email
• Conversions or ROI: How much revenue was generated or how many conversions (like a webinar registration) were completed

Create a master Excel spreadsheet or other document and track these results per email and then for the month or quarter overall to get a quick analysis of your email marketing’s performance. The time it takes to run the numbers is worth it to better track your results and know where to make improvements. 

Do you have any other tips for keeping your email marketing strategy fresh and engaging? Share your ideas in the comments below or tag me on Twitter with your thoughts!