Building an effective email strategy

Having worked within the Australian sports industry, there was a common theme many years ago that you should just send your email campaign to everyone.

‘But how does it hurt? Just send to everyone and you’ll get more sales’.

You may think that and sometimes you will end up lucky, but it’s a pour strategy and something you should re-assess for your business.

Having a customer journey and an effective email strategy is imperative in your audience growth, retention and conversion rate.

There are three major factors that I think about when creating campaigns.

• Importance of Segmentation

• Power of Personalisation

• Impact of data driven analytics

You should always segment your audiences for your campaigns, and in doing that you should also personalise their communications. Then, you use the data from your communications to drive your next campaign, messaging and audience.

Example:

Say you have a campaign selling the new summer range. You look at your existing audience and see a mix of females and males, different age groups. Depending on your company and how you engage with your audience you can segment this one campaign in to many different emails.

• Female

  • 18-24

  • 25-35

  • 36-45

  • 46-55

  • 56+

• Male

  • 18-24

  • 25-35

  • 36-45

  • 46-55

  • 56+

• Highly engaged prospects

• If you were coming into a national holiday (Valentine’s Day) you can market to purchase an item for your partner.. etc

The list goes on and you need to ensure that you don’t ‘assume’ anything from your audience, because that is where you can get offensive (and a little too creepy).

When you break down your different email comms, I love adding personalisation through many different add on features, whether it’s their name on an item, or within the body of the email etc.

Then, after you’ve sent your campaign you should actually spend some time looking at your statistics. Did you have a high unsubscribe rate? What demographic were they? What was the open rate? Did you email go into spam etc.

Never just build and send otherwise you will be spending money and never learning.