Let’s say you had an idea. Maybe you actually did, do, whatever -- I wouldn’t know. For right now, we’ll give you the benefit of conceptual doubt and say, just for the purposes of this article, that at some point in your life, you woke up from a deep sleep and said, “Aha!”
We’ll peg you for a renegade, a dreamer, the architect of some avant-garde brand. I’ll go so far as to say you know something I don’t know. The point is, you have ideas -- or an idea.
Let’s say you saw an opening, an opportunity, a gap in the quick-knitted tapestry of modern-day civil society, and now you’re sitting on solutions, arching your eyebrows in a thieving grin and rubbing your hands together as if there were something hearty and caloric in front of you.
Now, it’s time to capitalize. It’s time to put your entrepreneurial ducks in a row and exploit the demand of a modern consumer public. Maybe you want to play on emotions or tug at some metaphorical heartstrings. Perhaps you’ve designed an entire fear-based action plan, and you’re just looking for the perfect moment to leverage mass emotional appeal based on the anxiety, doubt or guilt of your potential market. That sounds good -- let’s go with it.
Now, look at you. You’re sitting on the bedrock of a veritable marketing plan: the idea, the opening, the slant. Now you need a vehicle. Thankfully, this is 2019, and you have nearly the entire census of North American society at your potential disposal -- a captive audience held hostage by the deep blue glow of cell phone screens and computer monitors.
There are social media channels and vast hero web ad space on the margins of just about every page on the net. But all that is going to cost you. You need something cheap, easy, manipulative -- you are, after all, a diabolical cutthroat capitalist out for the spoils of modern-day materialism. You need an email marketing campaign.
Here, I’ll show you my top three tricks for setting up a solid foundation for a constant contact strategy in email marketing.
Create A Solid Email Cadence
Without a doubt, one of the trickiest aspects of modern-day email marketing is cultivating and maintaining an engaged audience. You can’t just hustle your email list with a series of coupon codes and promo dates, sales banners or gimmick-centered discount incentives. You have to treat your audience like you’d want to be treated, while demonstrating a modicum of value, poise and judgment in your communications.
You can’t come around all Johnny-on-the-spot and tap their impulses only when you want something out of them. You have to get them on board with your brand and make them a part of your extended family. To do this, you need a variety of communications to finesse their trust. You need to optimize an email cadence around frequency and content diversity.
To accomplish all that, you should set up a communications calendar. I’d recommend setting this forecast for every two quarters. This way, you’ll have a long-view outlook of your email cadence, and at the same time, you’re leaving yourself the opportunity to reassess and strategize every six months. A few types of emails to include in this cadence include:
• Promo emails.
• Product introductions.
• Lifestyle emails or newsletters.
• Welcome emails.
• Surveys.
A well-planned, structured and diverse set of communications, curated in service of engagement, will help to not only promote your brand and bring awareness to your products but will also alleviate the buyer fatigue, disinterest and brand equity erosion inherent in strictly conversion-based communications.
Identify Segments
After you’ve figured out the what and when, fine-tuning the who should be next on the list of priorities. I could write an entire article on the art of email capture and covert approaches to Facebook data collection, heat map analytics, ambush pop-up maneuvers and beyond. But for the purposes of this article, we’ll assume you employed a whole operation of underground strategy and copped an email list off some sleeper channel on the dark web -- probably best not to do this in real life, though.
Now you need to slice up your email database and segment your lists so that the right people are engaging in the right content. You can do this in a number of ways.
Depending on the amount of data you have or the channels by which you captured your recipients, you can tailor content specific to certain demos and interests. Once you’ve done this and have sent out a few communications, you can begin segmenting your lists further based on open and click-through rates (CTRs). For the first several months, I’d stick to a 90-day open-rate segment to maximize engagement and avoid getting hit with spam notices.
Craft Quality Emails
This may seem a bit surface-level, but it’s probably the most important aspect in creating a successful email marketing campaign. If you don’t put the time into improving your content and optimizing it around a solid marketing strategy, all the analytics, aiming protocols or communications strategy on the back end isn’t going to help you drive conversions.
Depending on the type of automation platform or email marketing software you’re using, you should be able to look at CTRs and open rates, test different subject lines, create preview texts and A/B test content to refine your messaging around your specific audiences. This work is not only imperative to the improvement of your key performance indicators, but it is also vital to the perception of your brand. Once you do a little trial and error to find your voice, you should be consistent in your communications, efficient in your economy of words and precise in your messaging.
With this foundation, you now have a great start to get out there and reap the returns of a successful email marketing campaign.
