Email Marketing Strategy Best Practices for Growing Companies

Launching marketing strategies helps to get more prospects, leads, and customers. It’s highly effective when you want to grow your business. Email marketing has been a relatively cheap addition to the online marketing suite. There are several different types of email marketing that you can use to get new prospects, leads, and customers. To get the most out of your email marketing strategy, it’s useful to understand the different aspects and how they can affect your bottom line. As with all marketing strategies, email marketing focuses on generating a positive ROI based on both money and time investments.

Today we can access our emails from anywhere, so can the people that we are trying to sign as customers. That’s why email marketing is such an exciting marketing strategy. Once you understand the basics of email marketing, you can start generating new leads and eventually turn these leads into customers. And most of the tasks within email marketing are automated. You create an automated flow for any section within your customer journey and turn your prospects into leads, your leads into customers and your new customers into lifetime customers.

What is the definition of an email marketing strategy?

An email marketing strategy is a plan that contains all the different aspects of email marketing that your company is going to use over the next few months. The strategy has a simple goal: making sure that the money and time investments create a positive ROI. 

Just like with other marketing strategies, email marketing will take a few months before it pays off. You can turn it into an automated system that drives new sales for your products or services daily. But because email marketing has such a low investment money-wise, it can quickly become one of the highest ROI marketing campaigns within your company.

For most companies, email marketing consists of three basic steps:

1. Sending newsletters to your target audience

2. Sending cold emails to create new opportunities

3. Using drip campaigns to move prospects into SQL or MQL leads and customers

You start by creating a plan, including a calendar that outlines all the different steps you are going to follow to create a successful email marketing strategy. You need to ensure that your company is doing everything it can to turn this strategy into an automated lead generator and sales engine. You should get multiple people within your company on board, such as:

• A copywriter

• Your online marketer

• A designer

• Your data analyst

Email marketing is an excellent source for valuable data that can move your company forward. You can track all types of interactions and user behavior to analyze which campaigns within your email marketing strategy are working. It also allows you to cancel any campaigns that aren’t helping your prospects or leads move forward. 

By using practical email marketing tools, you will gain insights into different types of copy that work best for your company. They can also indicate what kind of industry is most heavily influenced by the email marketing materials that you are creating. 

And most email marketing tools seamlessly integrate with thousands of other tools. The data from your email marketing campaigns can be used to run ads on social media. It allows you to update your CRM in real-time and identify when you should contact a specific lead when they’re most likely to buy. Email marketing can become the core of your organization’s marketing and sales channels. 

Effective email marketing strategies

To create your own email marketing strategy plan, you first need to understand the fundamental aspects of email marketing. There are three types of email marketing techniques that can be used to drive traffic to your website to generate more leads and push leads towards the SQL or MQL stage:

1. Newsletters

2. Cold emails

3. Drip campaigns

Each email marketing technique has its benefits and can create opportunities differently. Newsletters can keep your target audience up-to-date about the latest insights published on your blog. They can also be used to tell your already existing audience about exciting new features. Cold emails can directly be sent to people around the world to create relationships. You can test the waters with each prospect to understand whether they might find your products or services valuable. 

Last but not least: drip campaigns can turn your email marketing into a data powerhouse. It allows you to see how leads interact with your emails. Once a lead hits a particular score based on their engagement with the emails you are sending, your sales team can go out and talk about your products and services.

Sending a newsletter

Newsletters are used to keep your target audience updated on the latest changes within your market. They can contain all types of links to content around the web. We often see companies use newsletters to tell their audience about new blog posts on their website. This email marketing strategy also focuses on providing information about your products and services. Newsletters are usually sent out weekly, but some companies choose to go for a monthly update. 

They are perfect for getting more people on your email lists, especially when you provide valuable content. Whether it’s a syndication of the web’s best articles about your market or your content, the audience loves learning new things. That’s why most companies publish newsletters, especially within the world of B2B. By providing new insights to move your subscribers forward, you position yourself as an authority in the market. It will pay off for your brand reputation. 

Getting people to sign up for your newsletter is also relatively easy - especially when you are already publishing your content. You can add sign up boxes to your website’s blog or Medium articles. Readers can opt-in through these boxes and will automatically be added to your current email list. Though some companies choose to make their newsletters entirely commercial, most companies focus on providing essential insights that anyone in their industry should know. 

Automating cold emails

Cold emails are useful when you want to reach the right person at the right time. It all starts with creating an email list of people that you want to reach. You can create an email list by using platforms such as LinkedIn or Anyleads’ Prospecting tools. Or you can print an email list template and get email addresses at events. 

Based on your customer profiles, you can get lists of matching companies that might be interested in your products or services. You can import these lists of email addresses into a flow of marketing emails. To improve your results, you should also focus on getting additional information about the contacts on your list, such as:

1. First name

2. Last name

3. Company name

4. Their role within the company

5. The company size

With cold emails, it’s often best to start without any commercial intent. Providing value to your prospects will pay off in the long run. Most people get multiple emails a day describing the “next big product/service” and ignore it. Instead of pitching your product or service, you should focus on establishing relationships with the people you reach out to. You can send them to your website by including an email signature, but it shouldn’t be the primary focus. Need some inspiration for a great signature? Check out our email signature templates.

Getting lists of email addresses is quite easy, but you need to be careful. Most email address lists out there are free to download or can be bought with a small investment. Do not download any free email address lists or buy any lists. In most cases, it will not result in signing any new business for your company. The lists are outdated, or most of the addresses on the lists don’t even exist. 

Drip campaigns for new leads

Drip campaigns have many different goals. Your business must understand what your internal goal is. How are you going to utilize the benefits of drip campaigns to drive your prospects into SQLs and MQLs? You can generate all types of automated email campaigns that feed your target audience more data. Based on their engagement with the emails you are sending, you can learn when you should send them to your sales team.

Drip campaigns are the perfect fit for both marketing and sales teams. It’s up to the marketing department to understand how they can use drip campaigns. They help to drive the prospects through all types of content to better understand when they should be sent to the sales team. 

An example would be a prospect opening the last five emails about your company and checking the pricing page for 3 minutes. This might indicate a high interest in buying your product or service. When you see behavior like this, you can send the prospect to the sales team. They can qualify the lead and help him or her understand the benefits of your products and services.

What should you aim for with your email marketing strategy?

An email marketing strategy should cover all the different sections of your customer journey and additional marketing efforts. For example, you can launch social media ads to get more subscribers for your newsletter. There are many ways through which your email marketing strategy syncs with the rest of your marketing efforts. Content marketing has always been a core aspect of marketing, and a strategy like newsletters work perfectly along with that. 

The main goal of an email marketing strategy is to understand what you want to achieve. Do you want to:

• Create more brand awareness for your company?

• Position yourself as an authority?

• Allow your company to collaborate with similar companies?

• Entirely focus on getting new customers on-board?

By creating a vision for your email marketing strategy, your company will experience a shift in the whole marketing department. There are so many uses for email marketing that your current marketing channels will see a considerable bump in success as well. 

Turning website visitors through Google ads into newsletter subscribers will allow you to reach them at any moment. This means you no longer have to invest in expensive PPC campaigns within Adwords. The average ROI of each marketing strategy that your company is currently utilizing will increase significantly.

A great email marketing strategy also provides new ways of creativity to reach your target audience. Though many companies already use cold email campaigns, it’s often useful to think of a new way to utilize it for your own company. 

What kind of input can you collect from within your company to think of new ideas to reach your target audience? Are there any patterns that your sales team is seeing based on the results from your recent cold email outreach campaigns? A great email marketing strategy involves different departments within your company to get the best results.

It might all seem complicated at first. That’s because it takes some time to understand how email marketing can transform the way you are doing business today. It allows you to be in the pack that is leading in your market. It can help you grow faster than your competitors because you are utilizing email marketing on every single level. And above all, it will help you understand much more about your target audience thanks to all the data you are collecting. 

Over the last ten years, companies that are purely focused on email newsletters such as MailChimp and CampaignMonitor have grown tremendously. And the main reason for their incredible growth is the movement towards email marketing within the online marketing world. Any company can start benefiting from it today. It just takes a great plan and an even better execution. 

What do you need to create an email marketing strategy?

Creating an email marketing strategy from scratch will come with its challenges. Launching Google Adwords campaigns is not going to be profitable from day one. This is also true for email marketing. Your different departments need to start collaborating and sharing data on different levels:

• The sales team needs to start talking to the marketing team to understand how cold email campaigns are performing. 

• The design team needs to collaborate with the marketing team to create stunning graphics for your newsletters.

• Copywriters need to be available to create the right subject lines for your emails.

Most companies will highly benefit from hiring a single person who is solely focused on fulfilling the email marketing strategy. But this person can only be successful when other departments and colleagues within the company collaborate effectively. 

A great email marketing strategy is not something you create in a day. It takes lots of analyzing, understanding user behavior, discovering new opportunities for growth. Your email marketing manager must also be familiar with all the different tools that allow you to take advantage of these new opportunities. Once you start implementing your email marketing strategy, you can be at the frontier of your industry.

How long does it take to create an email marketing strategy?

The email marketing strategy is never finished. It’s not a set-and-forget plan that you can perform weekly and neglect all the outcomes. It needs to be continuously updated. New experiments need to be launched to get better data. You need to look for new opportunities to turn newsletter subscribers into potential customers. Dozens of different aspects determine the outcome of your email marketing strategy. Most of the time, it’s hard to predict what kind of results you are going to see.

And that’s why it’s essential to set goals within your email marketing strategy. You need to know where email marketing is going to bring you. It requires a set target so you can start looking for factors that benefit your growth. But once you have several connected parts of the email marketing strategy in place, it will be easier to implement changes that will improve your results. 

Though it may take a few months to discover what types of email marketing strategies work best for your industry, it will be worthwhile to test and iterate based on open rates, click rates and conversion rates.