Emails. One of the most used digital functions capable of driving revenues worth millions when used right. If you crack the code to good emails, you’re going to be looking at a revenue of $32 for every $1 being spent! That’s a direct 32x jump, allowing you to place your bets on strategies that can grow your company a lot on digital.
Companies ask a lot of questions today to email specialists (yes, that’s an actual role and it’s pretty legit) and you need to be capable of answering them if you’re a smart email designer, these questions can vary from “Has this worked for another brand?”, “Where did you research this before setting it up?” and so much more! If you’re seriously looking to delve into the world of email marketing, you must be prepared to answer these questions and discover your email strategy.
Email strategies help in putting your customers in perspective with regards to their actions on your site. It gives you a breakdown of how they behave with your brand and makes it easier for you to market by segregating your most loyal customers to one-timers. Think smartly, and you’ll be able to get a lot of revenue from your customers over the long term and build a sustainable business model for digital.
Why Do You Need an Email Marketing Strategy?
Emails have grown over the years to become one of the more preferred ways in which marketers reach out to customers online. With digital marketing growing over the years, finding out unique ways to retain or gain a new customer online is an ever-growing challenge. The stats back this up as well – 93% of marketers in the B2B market using emails to distribute content.
There are plenty of other ways like social media marketing for example, which have evolved over the years. But email marketing is still seen as the best way to sell on digital. Close to 40% of B2B marketers claim that email newsletters are critical to their business, and they depend on emails to get their revenue online.
Good emails can influence behavior as well, with 59% of respondents saying their purchase decisions are influenced by the emails they receive. Having a sound strategy can make a massive difference to the way people view your brand, and over time, they would love to purchase from you as well.
By reaching out over email, you also come across as a polite brand that does not advertise via phone calls, which can be seen as intrusive. If your audience is genuinely interested, they will respond and via their actions, you will be able to confirm their interest and have future transactions as well.
When you’re planning out your email strategy, you must know what kind of a template you’d like to proceed with. This could set a precedent for your future emails as well, so do spend time deciding on a good one!
Text-Based or Image-Based Email?
This is an interesting debate that has a lot of supporters for either, so deciding which one you’d like to go with requires a decent amount of research and trial and error. If you’re going for either, you need to know about its advantages and disadvantages.
Text-Based Email
Getting a good text-based email is important because it gets your message across faster and can be downloaded sooner as well. A lot of email brands use rich text with minimal images, and it works excellent to their advantage.
We suggest that if you’re a newbie to the mantra of email marketing, you should opt for a text-based email first before treading onto image-based emails. This is because text-emails take less time to download and don’t require your email to go through a spam filter which can be hard with images.
However, with text-based emails, the designs need to be formatted appropriately to ensure that it doesn’t look too plain either. If it does come across as dull, then people might end up deleting your email and sending you to spam as well.
Image-Based Email
Images-based emails are popular because they can visually represent what your message is. This makes it easier for the customer to understand certain aspects of your email while being more visually appealing than the text-based ones.
However, having an image-based email makes it harder for spam filters to let it through because it fails to decipher if it is spam or not. In addition to this, certain customers don’t usually download images, thus rendering your efforts as futile.
Basic Pre-requisites for Nurturing Your Social Media Audience Effectively
You can generate leads but also keep customers interested if you satisfy a few pre-requisites to nurturing social media audiences. This is all you need –
- Relevant E-mail list: You can segregate your customers into smaller lists that are based on specific action points which include “Add to Cart,” “Products Viewed”, and more. These parameters indicate how a customer interacts with a product and also what influences their behavior. With a relevant E-mail list, you will be able to generate better results via pinpoint targeting.
- Good content: No matter how much you spend on E-mail marketing your content is ultimately the king. It is the crux of all your efforts and requires you to truly create content that delights the customer. Form a good creative team and over time, create emails that stand apart from the rest.
- High-converting templates: Templates available online make it easier for you to design a stunning email. This is because these templates have a track record of being successful. So, create emails that have a higher chance of converting into a successful transaction for you and your brand.
That being said, finding the right template requires a decent amount of research. Luckily for you, we’ve got some of the best templates shortlisted. Choose from over 1,500 templates that have a proven track record of success and fill it with some great content.
To understand how to use these email templates to your advantage, here are a few great examples to get you going:
Some of the best Email Marketing Strategies
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Desiree Linden’s victory in the Boston Marathon:
The Boston Marathon is one of the most popular marathons in the world, and for the U.S., Desiree Linden was the first American woman to win in more than 30 years! Her shoes and apparel sponsor, Brooks Sports took the opportunity to celebrate the partnership they had together. The result was a brilliant email campaign, dedicated purely to Desiree’s outstanding achievement more than anything else.
This campaign allowed the brand to showcase its loyalties and add value to the products. By focusing on the athlete as well, they generated more brownie points instead of going all out and advertising their shoes. The only real “advertisement” is the CTA that reads, “See Desiree’s go-to gear.”
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Birchbox Co-marketing:
The subject line for this campaign was brilliantly curated by Birchbox which read, “We Forgot Something in Your February Box,” which prompted curious readers to click and open their emails. Though Birchbox didn’t actually forget a discount code, it was just a smart trick to get the attention of the readers and it worked!
The discount code eventually turned out to be a bonus promo for a dress rental company known as Rent the Runway, which naturally fit into the profile of many Birchbox customers, ultimately showcasing a great example of co-marketing.
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Dropbox:
Dropbox found a smart way to get customers to “come back” with a cute and quirky email. It might be hard to love emails from companies whose products you’re not using, but Dropbox incorporated smart cartoons and emoticons to their advantage.
The email was short and sweet to emphasize the message which Dropbox didn’t want to take attention away from. They also smartly used incentives for recipients to come back, something like a limited-time coupon.
Top Email Template Designs to Inspire Your Next Email Strategy:
Now that you’ve seen some great examples of template usage, here’s a list of close to 1,500 amazing templates. You’ll be able to see the different ways in which people and brands have used these templates to garner the most attention. This has eventually helped them with either getting more customers on-board or getting them to purchase.
If going through so many seems an arduous task, then here are a few templates shortlisted by us which you could use the next time you’re planning out your email strategy –
- SendX: One of the best aggregators of emails and other useful digital marketing tools, SendX have their own set of templates which can be utilized to garner attention among your audiences. The emails can be chosen based on whether you’re looking to capitalize on topical, festive days or even general templates as well.
2. 99Designs: This is an excellent place if you’re looking for smart and creative designers. There are some fantastic templates to choose from and add to your email list if you’re looking to create some stunning designs. They have a set of some beautiful templates which can be utilized if you’re looking to add a lot more substance to your email campaigns:
Their templates include Personal Notifications, Promotional Emails, and Email Notifications among others.
3. Template Monster: Template Monster is another great option to go with if you’re looking to create smart emails even offline. They offer raw files that can be re-edited offline and if you have a team of designers with you, this is all you’ll need to create some stunning visual emails.
4. Email Octopus: Email Octopus offers customers a set of 4 themes as well as 11 intricately designed templates that can be used to create some fantastic emails. These emails consist of various types depending on what you’re looking to sell or notify the customers about –
- Blog Updates
- E-mail Opt-in
- Transactional
- Newsletter
- Product Launches
5. Cakemail: This software was created especially for email marketing and you can choose from a set of 20+ templates that are all tried and tested. The site also provides download stats for validation in case you had doubts.
- Zurb: With a simple UI, Zurb is a great site where you’ll be able to create both products as well as emails. All of these templates can be downloaded with just a single click and they can all be highly relevant to your company and what it sells.
7. Themezy: Themezy offers a set of fun, well-crafted and designed templates which you can directly download and use. Their simple interface is the real winner here, allowing you to choose and pick as per your perusal.
To Sum it Up
If you’re planning on starting an email strategy, know your audience well and execute a smart strategy. This can be based on either current trends in your industry or what your company is best known for. With time, you’ll notice an upward trend in responses from customers, which shows you’re on the right path!
If you’re planning on starting your email campaigns from scratch, we’ve got a great site to help you begin. A friendly Mailchimp Alternative will allow you to enjoy great functionality with easier incorporation of their tools so you can get started right away! So, go ahead and give it a try!
Author Bio
Rohan is a bearded marketer, currently working on growing SendX: Email Marketing Software. Feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter.
