How to Create an Email Marketing Strategy in 2023

A well-designed and effective email marketing campaign is the most cost-effective way to attract new customers and stay in touch with existing ones. A good email marketing strategy can help a business earn at least $50 from every $1 invested into email marketing — a weak strategy will not be able to achieve the desired ROI. Keep scrolling to read about how to create an effective email marketing strategy.

Set up your goals and metrics

Before you start working on an email marketing campaign, you must have a clear goal in mind. A clear purpose will allow you to measure how far you have come in achieving your targets. It would help if you also determined the various metrics you'll use to measure your success. One goal and one KPI is a great way to start.

Research your target audience

Time to gather information about your potential target audience to identify areas of interest. Conducting an external survey or interviewing your sales team will give you insights on how customers interact with your products or services. Analyzing the activities of your competitors, as well as reviewing and auditing your previous blog posts and social media, will help you understand your target audience better. Now that you have your target audience, do some research about their behaviours and values to find out what type of content they would like to see or what features matter the most to them. For example, if your target audience is Gen Z and your product is environmentally friendly, you might want to put an emphasis on this because they care more about social justice issues than any other generation. According to a study, 71% of consumers prefer buying from companies that share their values. All this research will help you think about the various topics and themes that will be included in your subsequent email campaigns. 

Build your email list

Since you've done the research part of an email marketing campaign, it’s time to build a list of subscribers. Here are some tips for building an email list:

• Define the type of content that you create. Creating content is a great way to build trust with your audience because it provides valuable information while allowing them to build a relationship with you. 
• Make one-time offers. A free offer is a great way to build a list. It can be a tip sheet, an e-book or a template. Before your audience downloads the content, they must provide their email address.
• Opt-in form. Many companies place an opt-in form on their website, allowing potential customers with an easy-to-follow link to sign up for your email marketing campaign.

Choose your email marketing campaign type

Deciding on the type of email marketing campaign that you will run can be very challenging. You might wonder, how often do I send out emails? What should be included in them? Every marketer has their own way of answering these questions. After gathering information about the various types of email campaigns, you can decide which one is ideal for your audience. You should also create separate lists for different types of emails to ensure that your customers and prospects are only interested in content that is most relevant to them. Here are several campaign types that will help you decide which one to use:

Traffic-generating campaigns

One of the most critical factors that you can consider when it comes to implementing email marketing is the ability to get click-throughs to your website pages. This can increase your referral traffic count and make it more likely that your potential customers will act once they've found your site.  It’s a great way to promote your website's high-quality content that will eventually boost the traffic to your blog posts and product pages, with a higher chance of converting those visitors into buyers. 

Brand awareness campaigns

With email marketing, you can stay relevant to your potential customers while providing them with the most current educational content. A brand awareness campaign can help you establish yourself as a leader within your industry and attract more potential customers. By hearing more from you, subscribers will likely rely on you when they need to know more about a certain topic or product. Lead nurturing campaigns A lead nurture campaign focuses on targeting your ideal customers with the highest purchase intent, helping you attract more potential buyers and convert them into sales. You can incorporate shopping-centric CTA’s designed to encourage recipients to add products to their cart.  Try analyzing your website's behavioral and purchasing data to determine which emails to send to potential customers. If you're planning on sending these to first-time subscribers or casual visitors, you might rush them and, possibly worse, discourage them from making a purchase. 

Revenue-generating campaigns

Creating cross-sell and upsell marketing campaigns for existing customers that target leads close to making a purchase decision is one way to generate revenue from your campaign. An example of this is creating an "abandon cart" campaign that aims to recover lost sales or a promotion to get users to upgrade their current equipment.  These campaigns are usually reserved for those at the bottom of the funnel and have shown strong purchase intent. This campaign type isn't for first-time visitors.

Schedule your email marketing

Think about how often you want to send out your emails, so eventually your target audience looks forward to your email. If you have a B2C business model, consider sending weekly newsletters that include product launches or promotional and seasonal campaigns. As for B2B, it's better to run campaigns for new blog content, surveys, free trials and upcoming webinars.

Review your campaigns to improve next results 

Regularly measuring the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns should be on your agenda at the end of each quarter. You need to know where you are succeeding and where your campaign needs improvement. Here are four factors that you should consider when it comes to assessing the effectiveness of email marketing:

• Deliverability — how often your email reaches the audience
• Open rate — the percentage of the audience who open your email from their inbox
• Click-through rate — the count of people who click your CTAs
• Unsubscribe rate — how many people opt out of your campaign

Although there are only so many perfect strategies for email marketing, these basic techniques can help you create a successful campaign. An effective email marketing campaign is the most cost-effective way to attract new customers and stay in touch with existing ones. With that in mind, you should identify the best design that will help you achieve your goals of creating profitable email marketing campaigns.