A complete guide to creating an effective email marketing strategy

E-mail marketing stands out as an essential pillar for any company wishing to strengthen its customer presence or increase sales. In fact, according to the Limtus 2023 report, nearly 4 out of 10 marketing professionals consider email to be extremely crucial to the success of their business, while 87% of marketing leaders say that email is essential to their success.

Establishing a good emailing strategy upstream is therefore fundamental to managing coherent, well-defined campaigns. With a high return on investment, estimated on average at $42 for every $1 invested according to the Data & Marketing Association, email marketing is one of the best marketing channels, whatever the means or size of the company. Beyond the high ROI, email marketing offers a high degree of control over campaigns: content, design, target audience and timing, enabling highly personalized messages to be sent based on user data.

Email marketing is proving to be a remarkably versatile and powerful tool, delivering a multitude of essential benefits. With its ability to minimize costs while maximizing personalization, its ease of performance measurement and its high engagement potential, emailing proves to be a crucial aspect of any successful marketing strategy.

So what's the key to developing a truly effective marketing strategy that takes full advantage of these assets?

What is an emailing strategy?

Emailing, also known as email marketing, is a direct marketing technique characterized by the simultaneous sending of an electronic message to a large number of recipients.

An emailing strategy is therefore a plan of action involving the sending of targeted electronic messages to achieve specific marketing objectives through a defined list of contacts. The objectives of a marketing plan can be varied: increasing sales, building customer loyalty, raising brand awareness, generating leads...

It's important to differentiate between mailing strategies and tactics. A mailing strategy is global in scope and integrated into the overall marketing approach. It is the overall plan defining the main objectives and long-term direction of mailing campaigns.

Emailing tactics are more short-term oriented, and concern the operational implementation of the marketing plan. These are the specific actions and techniques used to achieve the objectives set out in the mailing strategy. They answer questions such as: how and when to send emails, what types of content to include and how to structure messages.

While it's quite complicated to change emailing strategy, tactics are often adjusted based on performance measurements and analysis feedback to improve campaign effectiveness.

How do you create an emailing strategy?

1. Define your goals

Defining objectives is the first step in defining an emailing strategy. The objectives must be aligned with the company's overall goals: should we prioritize increasing sales, thus gearing email campaigns to dynamic product promotion? Or is it better to focus on strengthening customer loyalty, adapting email campaigns to emphasize captivating loyalty programs?

It's also vital that these objectives are clear and measurable. The SMART framework makes it possible to set objectives that are precisely defined, measurable, achievable, meets specific needs, and determined within a specific time frame.

SMART frame:

• Specific: Objectives must be precise, clear and simple, to remove any ambiguity. For example, instead of saying "increase customer engagement", it's better to specify "increase email click-through rates by +15%".
• Measurable: Objectives must be qualified and quantified. This makes it possible to measure progress, to know when they have been achieved, and to rectify any major deviations measured along the way. For example, "reach 100 new newsletter subscriptions per month" is a measurable objective.
• Achievable: Objectives must be realistic and agreed upon by all, in order to install a dynamic plan of action without demotivating teams with unrealistic expectations. For example, doubling sales in one month seems unlikely.
• Realistic: Objectives must be relevant and in line with the company's overall strategy and available resources, as well as with factors external to the company, such as market size.
• Temporal: Each objective must be clearly delimited in time. This allows you to follow the project in a structured way, and to have a clear vision of the time devoted to the work.

Finally, it's important to prioritize objectives according to criteria such as: importance and urgency, potential impact, available resources and alignment with corporate objectives. By prioritizing objectives and allocating resources more efficiently, you can be more effective in your mailing campaigns.

2. Segmenting contacts & building a mailing list

Not all contacts are alike. Their interests, preferences and behaviors can be segmented into different homogeneous groups. Segmenting contacts according to behavioral, geographic, psychographic or demographic criteria (firmographic for B2B companies) makes mailing campaigns more impactful and personalized. This data is available in your CRM or via Google Analytics, which can be used to study changes in online user behavior.

It's also important to know your audience. The best way to do this is to conduct surveys or polls among the most interesting customers. It's also possible to gather information by analyzing customer service conversations, online reviews or purchase histories, for example.

Segmenting your audience enables you to personalize the emails you send, the offers you make or the CTAs you provide, according to each distinct segment. These efforts should improve KPIs such as email open rates, link clicks and conversion rates.

In addition, it's essential to have the largest, healthiest contact list possible. Regularly cleansing the list by removing inactive or incorrect addresses improves email deliverability and the accuracy of analyzes. On the other hand, increasing the size of your list helps you get more conversions.

3. Plan email types on a roadmap

It's important to plan the type of email to be sent in advance, using a roadmap based on the objectives set, and the segmentation carried out beforehand. Each type of email has a different objective, which must correspond to the expectations and needs of the recipients. Newsletters, for example, help maintain an ongoing relationship with customers, thus reinforcing brand awareness. The strategic approach would be to determine the frequency and content of newsletters according to segmentation. In addition, promotional emails can boost sales by advertising a product or service. These campaigns are effective when combined with other marketing initiatives, such as new product launches.

On the other hand, indicating email types on a roadmap provides a clear vision of email campaigns. It allows you to plan when and how campaigns will be deployed and will provide greater clarity on the regularity of newsletters, or indicate the seasonality of promotional campaigns.

If you're just starting out in email marketing, we recommend sending one email a week. According to Mark Asquith, the cofounder and CEO of Rebel Base Media, "Rather than sending more, test what you already do. Then test frequency".

4. Measuring results

The final stage in the emailing strategy is results analysis. This process enables us to evaluate the effectiveness of our campaigns and refine future strategies. Several KPIs can be used to measure the impact of email campaigns, such as open rate, click rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate and revenue per e-mail.

Numerous tools are available to measure these KPIs. For example, you can measure the open rate free of charge with Mail Track, and consider sending a follow-up email just after the first one was opened, which can increase the reply rate by 80%.

In addition to KPIs, it is essential to measure the revenues generated by campaigns to assess the overall effectiveness of the emailing campaign in terms of profitability. By comparing the revenues obtained with the costs incurred for the campaign, companies can judge the financial efficiency of their emailing efforts.

In addition, it is possible to cross-reference quantitative data with qualitative values, by collecting data through customer feedback or surveys. This approach brings an extra degree of precision to the emailing strategy.

Analyzing data enables us to improve our game plan by pinpointing what works best and what doesn't, so that we can make informed decisions later on.

Global benchmark

Sometimes it's hard to know whether a campaign has been effective or not. Although the results vary significantly from one sector to another, a study by Forbes provides an indication of where you stand in relation to other companies.

Open rate: For 65% of small businesses, the average open rate is between 11 and 50%.

CTR: For 77% of small businesses, their CTR is between 0 and 10%.

Temporality: Of the companies surveyed, 40% say they send an email at least once a week, but less than once a day. Nearly a third say they send emails at least once a month, but less than once a week, and 12% send emails daily or less than once a month.

List size: The majority of small companies have a subscription list of between 0 and 500 contacts. Just over 30% have between 1,001 and 9,999 subscribers, and less than 7% of small businesses have more than 50,000 subscribers.