Email marketing is an effective tool for interacting with the audience. With it, a company can solve various problems: share important information, stimulate sales, collect feedback, etc.
However, stable growth of business-relevant indicators without a clear analysis and a detailed email marketing strategy cannot be achieved. Today we’ll talk about how to launch mailings without involving outside specialists.
Step # 1: form a team
Email marketing requires resources - both temporary and human. In order for your newsletters to successfully solve the tasks (we will talk about them below), you will need to form a team of several specialists. This is who it is desirable to have in a team, although very often companies want to limit themselves to exactly one unit - an email marketer in all forms:
- Email marketer, he is a project manager. He will steer the whole activity, organize and build the processes necessary for the work of email marketing. He is an analyst analyzing data by email channel.
- Specialists working with text. Since the text is the basis of any newsletter, you will need a copywriter and preferably an editor and corrector. If a staff copywriter is required, then the editor and corrector may be outsourced.
- Designer (and possibly coder). Newsletters should look good, so design will need to take time, as well as its implementation in letter templates. The assembly of the letter is greatly simplified if you use the block editor of letters. In this case, the email marketer can handle it on his own. If we are talking about the assembly of complex letters, then we can not do without an HTML coder.
As you can see, when building an in-house email marketing team, you need to expect that its size will be at least 3 people. The “correct” team consists of 5 employees, including an email marketer, copywriter, designer, layout designer and developer. Of course, the designer (or layout designer), developer and copywriter can be involved in other projects.
At first, with the help of mailing services, such as ours, one person will also manage to launch mailings, but if you plan to make email marketing an important channel for promotion, then you will need professionals.
Step # 2. Develop Email Strategy
After you have assembled the team, you need to decide what and how it will do. At this point, you need to develop an email marketing strategy.
This document describes important settings related to mailing lists. For example, usually the following items are included:
- Goals and objectives - what exactly do you want to achieve with newsletters (increasing sales, building a brand, etc.). Global business tasks need to be tied to the KPIs of the newsletters themselves.
- Description of the audience and key messages: what segments of the audience do you have, what exactly will you tell each of them.
- How will you expand the subscriber base. It is necessary to prescribe how you will attract new readers of the newsletters.
- Types of messages and email campaigns. It is important to draw up a technical description of what and how will happen: which email platform is used, which letters are sent after subscribing to the newsletter, purchasing, viewing goods and services on the site, etc. (i.e., you need to cover all types of mailings - marketing, trigger, transactional), when and what reactivation campaigns to launch?
Step # 3. Develop a mailing plan
Now it’s worth it to understand what and how you will write. At this stage, it will be a good idea to conduct a competitive analysis and see what competitors write about, what headlines and calls to action they use, and analyze the visual design of their letters.
These data need to be compared with the goals developed in the previous step. For example, if you want to stimulate sales, it is logical to write more about discounts and unique characteristics of goods and services.
Step # 4. Prepare letter templates
After you have decided on a complete list of mailings of various types, you will need to prepare letter templates for each of them. The presence of a ready-made template, in which you only need to download the content, significantly speeds up the process of preparing each newsletter.
In addition, the recognizable corporate identity of the mailing is also very important: it will be easier for subscribers to recognize your letters, so as not to accidentally close them.
Step # 5. Ensure regularity
This is exactly the stage where most of the plans to launch effective email marketing are collapsing. Mailing lists should first of all be regular. Only then will your readers interact with them on an ongoing basis.
It is important to keep a balance between desires, content creation capabilities and audience preferences. Writing every day is not the best solution, because your content will bother readers, they will unsubscribe and add letters to spam. In addition, publishing several times a week is trivial to create: you need to write and read the text, work on the design of the letter, make it up, and analyze the effectiveness of the mailing.
At the initial stage, 1-2 letters per week will be enough. So you do not have time to bother the audience and leave yourself enough time to prepare the content. Don’t forget about segmentation so that each subscriber receives relevant content.
The important point here is not to forget about automation. With the help of email marketing systems, you can configure both the sending of welcome letters with useful information for new subscribers, as well as more complex trigger mailings, when letters are sent in response to certain actions of the subscriber on the site or in the newsletters.
An example of a complete chain of messages for a travel agency (with the implementation of repeat sales):
Step # 6: analyze the results
Email marketing is one of those promotion channels whose performance can be qualitatively measured. You can analyze the statistics for each sent newsletter: how many people opened it, clicked on the links, performed the target action on the site. Compare the performance of each letter with the previous ones to understand what “fits” the audience better.
In addition, it is important to conduct a high-level analysis: how the behavior of subscribers changes over time, what is their average “lifespan”, engagement increases or decreases. For this, for example, DashaMail has a unique cohort analysis function for the email platform market in Russia.
At the same time, it’s important not only to follow the metrics, but also to correlate them with the goals stated in the email marketing strategy. This will help establish the exact numbers and KPIs that will not be taken from the ceiling. Surely it will turn out that some of the goals need to be adjusted so that they better correspond to the real state of affairs.
Conclusion
It’s quite possible to build effective email marketing completely in-house. To do this, you need to assemble a team of specialists who will be able to prepare letters, appoint those responsible for this work, and set goals and objectives. After that, there will be a tactical implementation: regular preparation of letters, analysis of the results, making changes to subsequent mailings, the use of testing tools.
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