The Key Principles of an Email Strategy

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Sustaining an effective email strategy

Building and sustaining an effective email and marketing automation strategy involves several key principles:

• Segmentation
• Personalization
• Timing
• Automation
• Testing and optimizing

Note: In this lesson, we’ll explore segmentation, personalization, and timing in detail. And we’ll explore automation and testing in later lessons.

Segmentation

Effective list management involves segmentation. This enables you build great email marketing strategies because targeting the right email recipients with the right content helps to increase conversions.

But what is segmentation? It is grouping similar users together and sending relevant content based on certain criteria. If you send messages to targeted segments within your lists, your recipients will find your campaigns more relevant to them.

Types of segmentation

Depending on the type of organization (B2B or B2C), you can segment your email recipients in different ways:

• Demographics: gender, age, geography, education, and so on
• Firmographic: Job role, industry, company type, or company size, for instance
• Psychographic: Preferences or Interests
• History with brand: Purchase history, and whether they’re a current or potential customer
• Sales cycle: Their stage in in the sales cycle
• Email engagement: Clicks, opens, or content formats
• Behavior: Perhaps they didn't complete a purchase (cart abandonment) or they haven't opened one of your newsletters in a few weeks (inactivity)

Personalizing email content

When it comes to personalizing emails, you can get creative with email content, subject lines, and responsive design, creating unique experiences for recipients. For example:

• Address the customer by their name.
• Offer the customer a product recommendation.
• Display products based on their viewing history.
• Live or dynamic images allow you to display real-time content over an image based on the subscriber’s personal data. For example, you can overlay a subscriber’s first name on an image, making the image look personalized to that recipient.
• Dynamic feeds allow you to populate emails with real-time product feeds from your website. These feeds can be personalized based on subscriber browsing history. This might include similar products to your purchases, most viewed, most shopped, and so on.
• Conditional logic blocks allow you to display different blocks of content in one email to different subscribers. The block of content can be personalized to a recipient based on their data. For example, you could create a conditional logic block which shows location-based upcoming events that differ for each recipient based on their location.

Email timing

It is very important to be strategic about the timing of your email, and to make sure it delivers the right message at the right time. This helps to drive open rates.

There are some steps you can take to ensure this:

• Use A/B testing to find the best send times for your audience.
• Identify optimal days for your campaigns.
• Take account of different time zones.