To create a powerful email marketing strategy, you must first focus on list growth. Without people on your list, there is no email strategy.
PERMISSIONS
You need to have an easy and accessible way for people to become a part of your list. Make it easy for people to stay in touch. It’s great if you have a website because it will be a key component to building your list. You must make sure you have a SignUp form somewhere obvious on your homepage. Also, make sure you have all the necessary permission levels in place. You only want people who have expressly given you permission on your list. You can do this by having a double opt-in set-up, or even just by making it easy for people to unsubscribe from your emails with an obvious unsubscribe option at the bottom of your page.
WHITELISTING
Next is getting your subscribers to whitelist you. To be whitelisted is when you have people add you to their trusted contact list with their email provider. This helps you avoid spam filters. If people have the promotion tab setup in Gmail this helps you show up in their main inbox.
SEGEMENTATION
Now that your list is growing make sure that you’re segmenting your list as you grow. Part of your strategy will be deciding how you will segment your subscribers. Once you start segmenting your list it will allow you to get personal. Personalization is the goal of any email marketing campaign. It will be a lot easier segmenting in the beginning than having to go back and do it. This means that you’re grouping people, according to specific variables that you’ve already decided on.
AUTOMATION
Using your knowledge of purchases, location, and interests, you can individualize your emails to create a greater impact. Just like segmentation, automation is best set up early in your email strategy. Automation allows you to scale your email marketing efforts and will help you focus more time on the important things. It takes out the manual work that eats up all your time. An example of automation is a post-purchase email sequence, think Amazon. After you purchase a product on Amazon, you receive a confirmation order that your order has been received, then you receive an email letting you know when it has been shipped and then another email notifying you that your product has been delivered. Amazon has the entire product lifecycle automated
Consistency is key. To help you be consistent I recommend that you build a content calendar. This will help you decide what emails to create, what to include in them, when to send, and whom to send to.
thewebpreneur 