Email marketing strategy

Content

• What is an email strategy?
• Stages of creating an email strategy
• Audit
• Competitor Analysis
• Goal Setting
• Planning

What is an email strategy?

Email marketing or email strategy is a detailed plan that defines the goals of sending emails and the ways to achieve them. This strategy outlines various types of mailings, subscription forms, automated emails, and other important aspects of email marketing. Such a strategy is a necessary tool for marketers, serving as a roadmap to refer to throughout the project. Furthermore, the strategy is often presented to management for approval and to secure a budget for conducting mailings.

Stages of creating an email strategy

Creating an effective email strategy can be divided into four key stages:

1. Audit
2. Competitor Analysis
3. Goal Setting
4. Planning

Audit

Before taking active steps, it is important to analyze the current situation. Ask yourself the question: "What do we already have?" Even if your company has never conducted email mailings, it likely has subscription forms or a customer database. There may have even been attempts to send emails in the past.

The aim of the audit is to identify existing data and understand where to start. To do this, it is necessary to pay attention to:

• The website and target audience.
• The structure of the contact database.
• The methods of collecting new subscribers.
• The service used for mailings.
• The types of emails sent.
• The results of previous mailings — open rates, clicks, conversions.

Competitor Analysis

At this stage, it is important to study what mailings your competitors are sending. To do this, simply create a few test email accounts and subscribe to your competitors' mailings. Then analyze what emails you receive and how they interact with you.

The results of the analysis can be conveniently presented in a table that contains information about your competitors' subscription forms, their mailings, and other significant aspects. To evaluate each feature, you can use a scoring system from 0 to 5, where 0 means the feature is absent, and 5 means it is fully present.

Goal Setting

This stage is one of the most critically important in the strategy. A clearly formulated goal will help you determine the subsequent steps. At this stage, it is necessary to answer the question: "What do we want to achieve?" The answer should be specific and measurable.

Select a few key metrics to focus on. These metrics may include:

• The growth rate of the subscriber base.
• Traffic generated through email mailings.
• The number of target actions (e.g., applications or orders).
• Revenue from these actions.
• The share of revenue in the total turnover of the project.

Although you will track many indicators during the assessment, these key metrics will help you monitor results and make adjustments to the strategy.

Planning

At the planning stage, it is important to determine how you will achieve the set goals. For greater clarity, the work can be broken down into several steps:

1. Database collection: how we will gather contacts, what forms to use, how to accelerate database growth.
2. Segmentation: what groups we will divide subscribers into and how we will work with each group.
3. Mass mailings: how often we will send, who will be responsible for content, and what topics we will write about.
4. Automated emails: under what scenarios we will interact with subscribers.
5. Measuring results: how and when we will analyze key metrics.

More detailed information about each stage of strategy planning can be found in the article by experienced email marketer Alexey Efimov, "How to Write an Email Marketing Strategy."