What is your email marketing strategy? What are your goals? Chances are if the word “blast” is still in your vocabulary, there is room for improvement. But don’t worry, we are up for the challenge. Effective email marketing should be anything but a blast; it should be specific messaging, sent to a targeted list of contacts who the content will resonate best with.

How do you pull this off? Focus on 6 things: Deliverability, Lead Segmentation, Clear/Concise Messaging, Send Time Optimization, Automation, and Analysis.

Related Blog: The Death of Email Marketing?

Deliverability
Deliverability is part of email marketing that no one ever wants to talk about, but in reality it’s the key to a successful email marketing strategy. When we consider deliverability, we are looking at whether your well crafted messages are reaching your contacts’ inboxes. Sounds pretty important, right? 

Email DNS setup is one factor of deliverability. By setting up your Email DNS, you are verifying your domain and telling email service providers like Gmail, Outlook, etc that you are in fact a credible email marketing source, not a spammer.

Weeding out contacts who have previously bounced or unsubscribed is also important to deliverability. It can be hard to let go of the leads we have worked so hard to generate, but if they really want to engage with you and your brand, they will come back. Until then? Stop sending them emails. This will damage your domain authority in the long run if you continue emailing contacts who no longer want to hear from you.

Lead Segmentation

Your company has worked really hard to generate leads, you have an awesome idea for an email marketing campaign, so you want to send it to everyone, right? WRONG. Each email marketing campaign should be carefully thought out to target the specific leads who will see the most value in the email content. For example, if you are hosting an event, you probably do not want to send this email to someone who just downloaded your company brochure for the first time yesterday. Instead, you would focus your efforts by sending this email to contacts in your database who have downloaded a few offers and visited several pages, specifically those related to your event topic. This content will be valuable to them and make them much more likely to convert by signing up to attend the event.

Clear, Concise Messaging

An email marketing campaign is not the platform for you to try to rewrite the next great American novel. There is still a pretty even split between people who open emails on a desktop and on a mobile device, but we want the content to be optimized for all devices, so concise messaging with one goal is key. A well developed email marketing campaign should contain compelling imagery, short body text or even bullets if possible, and a clear call to action. That’s it. Giving people multiple options of conversion in an email will only water down conversion rates. Show the recipient's your value by providing a clear, single point of conversion.

Send Time Optimization

There are email marketing benchmarks that predict certain days of the week are better than others for successful open and click through rates. What if you could get even more granular and send the email to each contact at the best time for them? Using AI technology developed by our partner, Seventh Sense, we are able to send email marketing campaigns out over an entire day to deliver the email to each contact at their best time for that day or over an entire week to reach them at their best time during a single week. 

Automation

As much as there is value in well planned, one-off email marketing campaigns, there is even greater value in a series of automatic emails that can be set up using a HubSpot Workflow. While these messages take time to set up, once they are developed and the workflow criteria is decided, you can create a system of automatic lead nurturing that runs by itself. When automatic emails are set up based on behavior criteria such as downloading an offer from the website or visiting a certain page and you engage with a lead automatically following that action, there is context. They are in the process of engaging with your brand and then they get an email from you acknowledging that and guiding them to the next logical point of conversion. That is lead nurturing at it’s finest. This is particularly helpful for engaging with these who are at the top or middle of the sales funnel and may not be ready to engage with your sales team just yet. This allows you to assist in nurturing them, but at their own pace.

Analysis

The last step of a successful email marketing campaign is analysis. Each campaign is part of an overall email marketing strategy, but to ensure the strategy is a successful one, each campaign’s performance must be analyzed before moving on to the next campaign. If you are not using Seventh Sense, this could be a simple analysis of whether that send time performed well, or it could be a deeper analysis of whether the content of the email resonated with your contacts. If you saw a high open rate, but a low click through rate, maybe your contacts were really excited to hear from you, but your messaging fell flat. You can combat this by selecting a different call to action for your next email or finding a different segment of your contact database that the previous call to action would resonate better with.