Research shows that a third of customers have visited a website or purchased a product or service, simply from viewing an email in their inbox. Email marketing is about giving your contacts valuable experiences that will keep them engaged with your brand, and the products and services you offer.
Keeping a pulse on the most recent email marketing best practices will help you to:
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Understand where you get the highest returns on your email investments
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Continually optimise your email efforts and associated marketing program
If your emails are no longer having the effect you need them to – whether it’s registering for an event, cross or up-selling customers, downloading content, or even just browsing the website – it might be time to re-evaluate email best practices to make sure you’re making the most of your email communications.
In this series, Triggerfish will be unpacking our Email Best Practice Toolkit to give you what you need to step up your email marketing campaigns.
Step 1: Define your email strategy
Before kicking off the process of developing your email marketing campaign, make sure you have a strategy. What are you trying to achieve in sending your email? Is the email part of a wider campaign, and how does it fit with the rest of your campaign activity?
Is your email a marketing, sales or operational email? Consider the templates you have to choose from, and plan your content based on your ultimate goal. It’s helpful to set some KPIs around what you’re trying to achieve so you can measure the success of the email against them, and optimise next time based on previous results.
Below are some email types that you might consider having available when looking at your template library:
- Nurture
- Event Invitation
- Sales/Offer
- Company Update
- Newsletter
- Operational emails
- Basic (used for confirmation emails or automated emails)
Step 2: Create your campaign calendar
Many marketers benefit from using a campaign calendar that shows;
- When emails are being sent? weekly, monthly, quarterly
- Audience: name of the list/database you are communicating with
- Email type: sales, marketing, event, newsletter, operational
- Email Purpose: branding, announcement, registrational, awareness (your CTA)
- Follow up activity: will you be communicating again when the desired action is not taken?
- Core message
To help with planning your email strategy we have an email briefing template you can download here.
The calendar will help visualise what messaging you are pushing to the market and when and will make sure you aren’t over-utilising particular lists.
Step 3: Set your tone
Consider the audience of your email. Who are you talking to?
- New customers
- Existing Customers
- Cross-selling
- Up-selling
- Young people
- Business people
…and the list goes on.
Before starting to construct the content for you email, consider both the audience and purpose for the communication. Language and tone of your email should be representative of the audience you are talking to. Consider the demographic of your audience, and in what tone they would best receive information.
These tips might help you get in the right frame of mind to write:
- Determine Brand Voice
- Write a conversation, not a sales brochure
- Break it up to form purpose-driven sections
- Be consistent in your language, tone and voice
- Test & edit – does the messaging fit the purpose
- Measure success – set your KPIs
Ensure the above considerations are balanced with the purpose of your email – whether it is a sales, marketing, operational or notice email type.
Keep an eye our for Part 2 of our Email Toolkit series where we're talking about how Email Construction is Key to success.
In the meantime, if you're interested to see how we have helped organisations like Hastings Deering set up their email marketing platform and template library, you can read about it here.
