Setting up an effective email marketing strategy is not an easy job. This process involves several steps that need to be gone through carefully. Below is an overview of these steps so you can get started on your strategy yourself. Start with thorough research and get a clear picture of your target audience. Once you have this clear, you can move on to the practical details. Below you will find all the information you need. If you need help or want to make sure you are on the right track, don’t hesitate to contact me. I am ready to help you.
To create a working email marketing strategy it is important to know who your target audience is and what your target audience wants. If you know this well, you will get significantly more sales and results from your email marketing.
The first question you should ask yourself is “who is my target audience?”. By knowing who your target audience is, you can tailor your email marketing strategy accordingly. What does your average customer look like? Here are some examples in which you can differentiate and a few examples:
You have now roughly determined who your target audience is, and now it’s time to learn what your target audience actually wants. Fortunately, there is a lot of data for this that you can use for free. To know what your target audience wants, your best bet is to go to websites like: Askthepublic, Quora or Semrush. All are free to use and here you can find questions your target audience is asking.
Suppose you sell solar panels, then it is useful to know what your target audience wants to know, what the objections are and why someone wants to buy solar panels. You can then look this up on a website like askthepublic where you will get the following result:
Here you will see all relevant questions that will give you insight into your target audience. For example, here are the following questions:
“is solar panels profitable” -> Obstacle: price
“Is installing solar panels difficult” -> Obstacle: difficulty
So this tells you that the target audience looking for solar panels has a question about the price and whether it is a good investment. In addition, they want to know if it is difficult to install. If you know how to respond to this and remove these objections or obstacles with your emails you already get a reasonable email marketing strategy.
For a good strategy, it is helpful to look at who your competitors are. Stay one step ahead of your competitors by doing the following two things.
Subscribe to all your competitors’ newsletters. This not only provides a constant stream of inspiration, but you also keep a finger on the pulse. See what your competitors are doing well in their emails and where there are areas for improvement. This way, you always stay one step ahead of the competition.
Check out your competitors’ reviews. Analyze the 5-star reviews to see what customers rave about, and study the less positive reviews to determine what you need to address in your communications. If your competitor only has a handful of reviews, you can go through them yourself and draw conclusions. If you have a large number of reviews, you can save time by having ChatGPT analyze and summarize them.
Now that we’ve gathered all the information we need, it’s time to create the practical side of the email marketing strategy.
We have identified what the target audience wants to know. With this information, we can create a relevant lead magnet to collect email addresses. Let’s take the solar panel example. Some relevant lead magnets:
E-book: A guide with everything you need to know for purchasing solar panels: In this lead magnet, you can then answer the key questions we found during our audience research.
Calculation Tool: Create a calculation tool to calculate how much money one can save by purchasing solar panels
Comparison Guide: Compare different situations and name which solar panels fit them (link to your own products).
These are a few examples but you can come up with many more. The important thing is that the lead magnet is relevant to the target audience. Substantiate which one fits your business best by looking at the data you have collected.
The next step is to determine which campaigns you want to send. The best thing to do here is to create a content calendar in which you already plan most campaigns. Here are some email ideas you can use for your content calendar:
Anyway, there are a lot of campaigns you can think of around any brand. In your campaigns, focus on bringing value to your customers. Keep your emails interesting, informative and fun to read. Try not to constantly send offer upon offer, this damages your brand image and the results of your email campaigns.
What automatic emails should I create? This varies greatly from company to company what can and cannot work. Below are some flows as examples, see for yourself which flows might be relevant to your company or brand:
Lots of automated emails you can set up for your business. If you have any questions feel free to contact us!
Which e-mail marketing strategy works best for you depends on many different factors. In any case, it is important to start from the data available and the desire of your target audience. By following the steps above, you are already ahead of 80% of your competitors. Follow the steps carefully and you will get a nice targeted email marketing strategy that is backed by data. Good luck and if you need help, contact me!