Is email marketing dead? 

If that were true, then 81% of SMBs wouldn’t still rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel, which offers a retention rate of 80%.  

The number of email users is set to grow to 4.6 billion worldwide by 2026, making up more than half of the world’s population. 

Is this an opportunity you are willing to miss out on with a presumption that email marketing is dead? If not, you are at the right place! 

Here, we will learn how to create a robust and effective email marketing plan that drives results. So, let’s get started! 

Brief Overview Of The Importance Of Email Marketing

Before we dive into the steps for getting started with email marketing, let’s first understand what is an email marketing strategy and how it helps your business. 

An email marketing strategy is a roadmap for using emails to reach the right audience and market your business’s offerings. This helps businesses get better leads and convert them into paying customers for better revenue generation. 

But this is not the only reason why you need email marketing as there are many other reasons, including:

• Effective Segmentation: Targeted marketing has become one of the most important aspects of modern digital marketing. An effective eCommerce email marketing strategy will help you nurture and segment leads to enhance the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign.    
• Better Engagement Rates: The other great thing about email marketing is that it offers you better engagement rates. Since email has existed for a long time, people are likelier to open their emails and engage further with your brand. 
• Affordable: Most businesses lack the resources to spend on hefty marketing budgets. Email marketing is an excellent tool for those helping them facilitate effective marketing without burning a hole into their pockets.  
• Real-Time Communication: One of the best things about email marketing is that it allows you to reach your customers in real-time. Since most people these days use their mobile devices to access emails, it is easier to reach them in real-time via email.      
  

Steps To Create An Effective Email Marketing Strategy As A Beginner 

With a better understanding of the wonders that email marketing can do for your business, it is time to craft your strategy. So here are some of the most important steps to remember when creating a robust email marketing strategy plan.  

📧Step 1: Start Defining Your Goals

You need to determine the specific goals you wish to realize with your email marketing campaign. It will help dictate the type of campaign you need, the target audience, and the content you need to feature in those emails. Your goals will also help make it easier to measure your goals as you go. 

You must evaluate your business’s needs when trying to define the goals of your email marketing campaign. It will help you determine if you need to:

• Drive more web traffic
• Send out news
• Welcome new members
• Request donations
• Promote products or services
• Remind customers to complete their shopping journey

A clear understanding of these goals is imperative for crafting the ideal B2B email marketing strategy catering to every business need. Also, ensure your email marketing goals are realistic and measurable to track progress better.      

📧Step 2: Build Your Email List

Now that you have a better sense of your email marketing campaign’s goal, it is also likely that you have picked a target audience for your campaign. It is time to search for those audiences and gather their contact list. This will help you reach out to the right audience and enhance the overall effectiveness of your campaign.  

In case you are creating an email list right from scratch, you can get started by:

• Putting up a sign-up sheet on your website.
• Circulate the sign-up sheet through social media platforms.
• Leverage the services of an email service provider to access a ready-made email sheet specific to your needs.  

You must continually grow that list and take your business’s offerings to a broader audience. It will help you reach a wider audience with an email marketing strategy for eCommerce that works. 

📧Step 3: Choose an Email Marketing Service

Now that you have an email marketing list with all your necessary contacts, looking for a reliable email marketing agency USA to get started is essential. Email marketing is a complex and demanding ordeal, but hiring a reliable email marketing agency can help make things more manageable. This will improve the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign and drive better results with limited resources.        

If you are looking for an email marketing agency, it is recommended you seek:

• Industry expertise   
• Email marketing tools
• Support ecosystem 
• Expertise in email marketing 
• Talent pool

These evaluations will help you pick the right email marketing agency that caters to every specific need of your business. But more importantly, this will help you keep track of your progress and monitor essential metrics to deploy necessary enhancements.  

📧Step 4: Create Compelling Content

Content is one of the most important requirements of any effective email marketing campaign. Content in email is all about persuading the reader to take action and engage with your brand. You must use quality-driven, engaging, and attention-grabbing content that attracts your customers and incites them to take action. 

You might even consider using a reusable process and breaking your message into three primary sections that include:

• Headline: Use the headline to highlight what you are offering.      
• Body: The body primarily highlights how your product or service will benefit the customer. 
• Call-to-Action (CTA): The CTA must indicate what the reader should do next, so it helps add some commanding phrases to the CTA.  

This is a simple yet effective formula to help you create the right email that strikes the right cord with your target audience. Content is very important to ensure your email marketing strategy’s success, so using an eCommerce email marketing software might be helpful here.  

📧Step 5: Design Eye-Catching Campaigns

Now that you have the right content, it is time to start creating your first email marketing campaign. You first must create a campaign structure that strikes the right cord with your target audience. The campaign’s overall structure must be easy to read and understand to drive better conversions.    

You can even consider adding interactive and attention-grabbing visuals that help drive better engagement. Even numbers suggest that visual instructions are 32% more effective than written instructions. This number alone is enough to ensure using the right visual can help you drive better engagement.  

Another important factor you need to remember while designing your email marketing campaign is personalization. You must ensure that your email marketing strategy has the ideal tinge of personalization to build a connection with your audience. This will help your brand build a connection with the customer, increasing the likelihood of them converting and turning into loyal customers.  

📧Step 6: Analyze and Optimize

Testing and optimizing are the final and most essential ingredients for creating a successful and performant email marketing strategy. It is fair to presume that you have created the ideal and most effective email marketing strategy, but have you? Practical analysis and monitoring are two simple ways to determine the answer to this question.    

Thorough testing and analysis will help you better understand what is wrong with your email marketing campaign. More importantly, this will help you weed out all the underperforming elements that might hold your campaign back. You can use this data to deploy all the necessary corrective measures to address these flaws and enhance the effectiveness of your campaign.   

Measuring the results of your email marketing campaign is another important aspect on this front. You can contact an email marketing agency to seek their expertise and make better sense of these results. Based on these outcomes, you can make the necessary enhancements to enhance your campaign’s effectiveness and drive better conversion.  

Simplify Email Marketing And Use It To Your Advantage Today!

By now, you have a solid idea of the overall effectiveness of an email marketing campaign. These are reasons enough to invest in email marketing and take your business to the right audience to engage with your brand. It will help you drive better engagement as long as you can use the right content and essential tools to measure the performance of your campaigns. 

To create an effective email marketing campaign, you first need to define your goals. This will help you choose a target audience and create an email list based on that data. Then, you need to choose an email marketing agency and create compelling content. 

Lastly, you need to create attention-grabbing content that strikes the right cord with your audience and measure the results of your campaign to determine discrepancies and address them. Leverage email marketing to your advantage and take your business to greater heights.

All the best!  

Read Also:

• 10 Best Ideas For Video Email Marketing
• 4 Best Email Marketing Services for Small Business (2021)
• What Is One Of The Benefits Of Using Templates For Your Email Marketing Campaigns?