Building your email marketing strategy in 2023

A comprehensive introduction to the strategy of email marketing, giving you the tools to begin cultivating and converting your client base in order to take your company to the next level. It’s easy to overlook how effective and important an email marketing plan is for a company when we live in a world where everyone is rushing to jump on the latest social media craze.

By 2023, the majority of emails will be opened on mobile devices, making it possible for you to communicate directly with your target consumers. The fact that individuals are more careful about who they let into their inboxes contributes to the fact that inboxes are less congested than outlets such as social media. You may increase client engagement with your company by utilizing the appropriate email marketing approach, as well as creating extra income streams and consistently driving sales with the help of sequences and funnels.

You may now exhale a sigh of relief since it turns out that your company does not need to always follow the latest TikTok dancing trend in order to attract new clients. Your company has the potential to consistently create leads and drive sales, even if you do not have a huge staff or a significant budget if you focus on core email marketing tasks such as expanding your email list, nurturing subscribers, and establishing conversion funnels.

In this piece, we will discuss the email marketing methods that have shown to be the most successful for companies that want to increase their number of leads and income. Using these strategies, you will be able to begin the process of nurturing and converting clients.

The importance of email marketing

We have discussed the answer to the most crucial question, which is “what is email marketing,” but we have not yet discussed the reasons why email marketing is so extremely vital for your company. Let’s discuss this topic right now.
Email is still the most successful way to nurture leads and increase client loyalty, despite the rise of social media and unwanted spam email (which, by the way, is never a smart marketing approach).

Email marketing should be one of your top objectives for many different reasons, but here are the three most important ones to consider first:

1.  Email is the most used method of communication. Did you realize that at least 99% of customers read their email at least once every single day? It is not possible to say the same thing about any other mode of communication.
2. You are the owner of the list. Your account on any social media network (together with all of your fans and posts) might be removed or suspended at any moment, for any reason, and without prior warning at any point in time. Nevertheless, you are the exclusive owner of your email list. That advantage will not be taken away from you by anyone.
3. Email just has a higher rate of conversion. Consumers who make purchases after receiving offers through email spend 138% more money than those who do not subscribe to get email offers. In point of fact, the return on investment for email marketing is 4400%.

That is a tremendous deal! And if you are thinking that social media converts even better, you should reconsider since the average order value of a customer who makes a purchase through email is at least three times larger than that of a customer who makes a purchase through social media. Simply put, email is by far the most effective method for making sales online. Now that you understand the significance of email marketing, let’s discuss the most effective strategies for doing it.

Methods for achieving the best possible results with email marketing campaigns

A marketing automation platform should be the starting point for every email marketing plan. Not only are you able to carry out all of your essential email operations from a single window, but the correct platform will also guarantee that you comply with all of the rules governing email.

How to choose the most effective platform for email marketing

It is natural that the sheer number of email marketing platforms now accessible has left you feeling confused and overwhelmed. In the previous two years, the marketing technology business has grown by 24 percent, bringing the total number of available solutions to a staggering 9,932. These solutions range from analytics to video platform software. If your company is interested in switching to a new email marketing automation platform, the following advice can make the platform decision process simpler, allowing you to return your attention to expanding your client base and bringing in more revenue:

Prioritize your own business’s model and objectives:

Before committing to an email marketing automation platform, it’s important to ask yourself and your team what you hope to achieve by using such a system, both immediately and as your business or organization grows.

Automating marketing processes is often done to achieve these aims:

• Increasing the number of high-quality leads you’re receiving
• Developing new avenues for upselling and cross-selling
• Plug the holes in your sales pipeline
• Increasing the value of current consumers over time
• Increasing the number of supporters and faithful buyers

Select a Marketing Automation system based on its ability to provide the things you value most. Use this checklist as a guide when you conduct your own investigation and speak with potential service providers.

• Functionality. The question of functionality begs the answer “Is there one function of email marketing that you require to be done extremely well?” Or do you require assistance with a wide range of marketing activities? Does the service provide all of the features you require?
• Customizability. How much say do you want in the look and feel of your email newsletters? Will you be making use of sample documents? Or do you want highly specialized solutions?
• Management. If you’re in a managerial role, ask yourself if you need a platform that requires a large team or lots of people to run. Is your marketing team small, without a single person who can keep track of all your contacts, or is it large enough to have a person whose sole job is to handle this
• Service. Do you require a fully customized solution that takes weeks to implement, or are you more interested in a turnkey service that you can start using in a matter of minutes? Is a drag-and-drop editor something you could use? Do you want to have a look at the HTML code, instead?
• Simplicity. How well thought out and organized is the interface? Can you quickly get the resources you require to complete your tasks?
• Ease of use. Does your organization require real-time reporting? Does it record the KPIs that matter most to you? Do you have to manually run the reports, or do they run automatically?
• Niche. Does an all-purpose system provide the measurements and features you’re searching for? Do solutions exist that were developed with your business’s specific duties and reporting requirements in mind?
• Price. What tiers of pricing are available? What factors into the price: total contacts, total messages sent, or a set subscription rate? What extra features cost more? How will pricing alter as you increase in size?
• Scalability. Is the platform scalable? Can new features be added without disrupting existing ones? Is it scalable to meet the needs of your expanding fan base?
• Support. If you need help, ask if the support team is quick to respond and has all the answers you need. What are the best ways to get in touch with them? What kind of self-help resources, such as FAQs and guides, are available?
• Integrations. Concerning integrations, think about how your marketing automation software will interact with other tools you already use. If you want to integrate it with other systems, such as your customer relationship management system or your website, how do you do that?

Obtaining information about email subscribers through the use of form forms

Collecting email addresses and other information about subscribers in order to establish an email list is the phase in any email marketing plan that is considered to be the most essential. This list of subscribers will be compiled for you automatically by your marketing automation software, allowing you to start establishing relationships with them right now!

What exactly is a web-based email form?

You will gather email addresses by having subscribers fill out an email form, sometimes referred to as an opt-in form, which is designed to collect information from subscribers. One of the most important components of any marketing strategy is an email form, which offers a safe and reliable method for gathering information from your potential clients and existing consumers.

What exactly are form fields, though?

You may use a variety of different forms as part of your email marketing plan; however, the simplest forms consist of only two fields: one for the person’s name, and another for their email address. You have the option of coming up with email sign-up forms that demand as much information about the subscriber as is humanly possible, depending on the approach you use.

Which of the form’s fields ought you to be including?

When you include more fields on your email sign-up form, you will collect more information about each of your customers. This will enable you to promote your products or services to them in a more efficient manner. Take, for instance, the case where your class is geared toward assisting time-pressed professionals with their productivity. In such an instance, you might include form fields that ask questions about their ways of life, such as the number of people in their family and the business they are employed in. You will be able to personalize the content of your emails and promotions to the recipients by tailoring the content to themes that are relevant to them depending on the responses they provide to these fields.

Take care not to make your forms unnecessarily lengthy and specific. People are typically too busy to fill out long forms due to time constraints. It’s possible that some people are uneasy with the idea of revealing personal information. It is important to focus on a frictionless procedure while also giving consideration to the user experience if you want more individuals to enter your marketing funnel.

How to design your emails to ensure the success of your campaign

It is essential to the effectiveness of your marketing efforts that you consider how your audience reacts when they get your emails. Deliverability, click-through rates, and open rates are all affected by the appearance of your emails, as well as how easy they are to read and how they are structured.

The following are some of the best practices in email design that you should implement to guarantee that your marketing emails are engaging your audience and leading to conversions:

• Choose one topic and one call-to-action (CTA) per email. One of the most common mistakes that marketers, especially those who sell courses, make is to cover too many topics and share too much information in an email. Each of your emails should have one clear message and one clear request. This will keep your readers from getting confused or overwhelmed. If the topic you’re writing about is complicated, you might want to break the emails up into a series that builds up the excitement.
• Keep your email length around 50-125 words. Even though not every email has to be under this number of words, you should try to make them as short as possible. If your email is short, it’s more likely to be read all the way through.
• Keep the most important information at the beginning of the email. People read marketing emails for an average of ten seconds. In other words, people aren’t willing to wait until the end of your email to get what they need from it. You have to get their attention by putting the most important information at the top, so they can get something out of your emails even when they don’t have much time.
• Use line breaks and pictures to make your email easy to read. Write so it’s easy to read. Separate text into paragraphs of no more than three sentences each. Make your content easy to read by using headings and bulleted lists. Add pictures, infographics, gifs, and memes to your writing to get people’s attention and keep them reading.
  Stick to simple colors.
• You should only use one or two colors in your emails. Most often, you’ll use the colors of your brand. The fewer colors you use, the cleaner your design will look, making it easier for the reader to focus on the content.

How to write emails and sales funnels that get people to buy

So, what do you write in your marketing emails to inform, inspire, and turn people into paying customers? The key is not to start writing right away. First, you need to know what your emails are all about and what your marketing goals are. Usually, there are two main goals of an email marketing plan:

• Inbound advertising
• Outbound Sales

In other words, your email marketing strategy will either keep in touch with people who have already signed up for your list or grab the attention of new people and turn them into warm leads or customers. How do you get people to open, read, and click on your emails? To nurture and convert your subscribers, you don’t need to be creative or a good writer to write great marketing emails. Email copywriting isn’t about being creative, and you don’t have to be a master of words to get good results.

Here are the three main things that make an email interesting:

• Talk directly to the people you want to hear you.
• Including titles that make you want to know more
• Content that is short and has one clear goal

Here’s how you can use these three winning elements in your email copy:

Step 1: Figure out who your ideal customer is (ICP). Before you start writing anything for marketing, you need to know who you’re writing for.

• How well do you know the people you want to reach?
• What are they interested in?
• What is the one thing you want them to do after they read your email?

Step 2: Write headlines and subject lines that make people want to read more.Writing headlines that get people’s attention isn’t as hard as it sounds. A hook-worthy headline is just one that stands out among all the other marketing emails the reader is getting. Here are some ways to make sure that the subject lines of your emails will get opened:

• Write three to five different subject lines so you can compare them and choose the best ones. (Note: Because of the iOS 15 update, which messes up open rate data, you may want to A/B test click-through rates instead of open rates. More on that below.)
• Keep the number of characters to less than 50.
  Include personalization when possible: “One’s own name is the most beautiful word in the English language.” Your email form will automatically get their name, and if you add a command like “[First Name],” your marketing software will probably fill it in for you.
• Keep the tone conversational: Avoid language that sounds like a canned marketing email. Use contractions like “you’re” instead of “you are.” Emojis can make things more fun.
• Pay attention to the subject lines that interested you: Copywriters and marketers keep a “swipe file” handy, where they can quickly screenshot or save good copy or ads for inspiration.

Step 3: Be aware of words that spam filters look for. Even though these words don’t necessarily mean that your email will end up in SPAM, you should be aware of them. In the future, when you’re trying to fix problems with click-through rates and deliverability, it’s helpful to know how these words could affect your results. ActiveCampaign says that SPAM filters tend to mark words that are linked to:

• Scams
• Gimmicks
• Schemes
• Promises
• Free gifts

Examples of some SPAM words and phrases are:

• #1
• 100% more
• 100% free
• Additional income
• Be your own boss
• Financial freedom
• Free Consultation

Revenue-generating list-building email marketing strategies

Email can be your most profitable way to sell, so building your email list should be your top goal. Your email list will have the most interested and likely customers/students. Statista says that email marketing will bring in almost $11 billion by the end of 2023, so it’s important to be able to reach as many potential customers as possible through their inboxes.

So how do you get more people to sign up for your email list? The first step is to offer something of value to your audience in exchange for their email address. We’re getting more promotions, ads, and spam than ever, and people are paying more attention to ways to stop being so overwhelmed by digital stuff. So, people won’t just give us their email addresses—we have to make them want to. Lead magnets and gated assets come into the conversation at this point.

Creating a lead magnet, which is a protected asset, to attract new subscribers

A lead magnet is a freebie or giveaway that your target audience wants because it has the information they want. eBooks, quizzes, guides, cheat sheets, checklists, templates, and swipe files are all common types of gated assets in B2B. To get people to sign up for your email list, you need to keep promoting your lead magnet. Keep it in the middle of your website’s home page and offer it on a separate landing page that you can send people to with LinkedIn posts or podcast interviews.

How to pick the right lead magnet for your business

How will you know which lead magnet your business needs? Think about the problems your audience wants to solve and the type of content they are most likely to read.
For example, a busy salesperson who is having trouble setting up meetings doesn’t have time to read a 30-page ebook, so they are more likely to download scripts and templates for cold emailing. A chief marketing officer might usually read trade magazines, so it would be best to make something that fits the way they get their information.

Here are some examples of free gated assets that will get people to sign up:

• Cheat sheets
• Workbooks
• PDF guide
• Audio / Video training
• Challenge
• Quiz
• Free online courses

How to get potential customers to sign up for your email list

Now that you’ve made a lead magnet that people will want to sign up for, you need to figure out how to get people to it. Here are some steps you can take to build a list of potential customers who will read your emails.

The press and interviews
You or someone from your business should offer to be a guest on podcasts in your industry. Interviews put you in front of new people in your niche and help you establish thought leadership, which is important if you want to grow your list of subscribers. At the end of the interview, you’ll have a chance to promote your brand, which is a great time to talk about your free lead magnet.

Paid posts on blogs
If you work in finance, you could ask a personal finance blogger with a lot of readers to write a blog post about your business, product, or brand. Most of the time, this will mean paying a one-time fee. There will be links to your gated asset all over the post. Influencer marketing, sponsorships, and affiliates are all ways to promote your business.

Marketing with Influencers
Influencer marketing is popular with B2C and lifestyle brands, but B2B brands can also benefit from it. Influencer marketing is a way to get people to trust a product or service by having people with a lot of social connections recommend it.

Webinars, roundtables, and fireside chats can be done together
Co-host a webinar with other businesses and thought leaders in related fields that will reach a lot of people. These are best if they are not directly competing with you. All of the emails you get will be added to your list of people who want to hear from you.

Quick tips on how to keep your emails lawful

There are rules about email marketing to stop spammers from getting people’s email addresses without their permission and sending them emails they didn’t ask for. Most likely, if you’re using a good email marketing automation platform, you’re already following these rules. However, you should still know about them so you don’t get fined. Here are some easy ways to stay on the right side of the law when you email your list:

• With a double opt-in, you can be sure you have the people on your list’s permission to send them emails.
• Don’t use header information that isn’t true.
• Use disclaimers to let people know this is an ad or marketing email.
• Put your address in.
• Always include an “opt-out” link so that people can stop getting your emails if they don’t want to.
• Respond quickly to requests to opt-out (your marketing platform should do this for you automatically).

A step-by-step plan for getting leads through email marketing

Even if your marketing team is lean, you can use the following steps to create compelling emails that build a loyal subscriber base for your business.

Step 1: Segment your email list

Segmenting your emails means dividing your email subscribers into groups based on certain criteria. You could divide your emails into different groups based on things like who they are, what forms they filled out to join your email list, and what they do, like clicks and opens.

Segmenting is important for keeping your list of subscribers healthy and interested because it lets you personalize your emails based on what your audience wants to know instead of sending everyone the same message. Try out this plan. Now that we have more data than ever, marketing automation lets you send your subscribers emails that are timely and relevant to their interests. Use a questionnaire to let people self-segment.

For example, if your business or company offers online courses as a way to make money, you might not want to send “101” content to subscribers who want to learn more advanced techniques, depending on your industry and the subject of your courses. You could make one of your welcome emails a survey that asks the subscriber, based on their journey, what kind of information they’d like to read.

Step 2: Set up automated email sequences and funnels and test them

Every successful strategy for getting leads and turning them into paying customers depends on automated funnels and sequences that turn prospects into paying customers on their own. An automated funnel is the steps you guide your leads through to convert them into customers at the end. Your automated funnel will include email marketing, social media, and landing pages.

How to set up sequences that run themselves. Welcoming each person individually when they opt-in to your email list would be impossible, which is where your marketing automation platform’s ‘autoresponder’ feature comes in. When someone signs up for your email list, your marketing automation platform sends them a series of emails over a certain amount of time based on the rules you set. The best way to keep in touch with your audience on autopilot is through automated sequences.

See it in action: a picture of an eCommerce course funnel. Let’s say you’re a company that sells things online and you’re holding a webinar to promote your course on how to do well in eCommerce. To get people to sign up for your webinar, you could schedule some tweets or LinkedIn posts a few days before the webinar. People will see these social media posts and go to your registration page, where they will fill out their information to sign up for the free webinar.

Your marketing automation platform will mark them as “interested in eCommerce” and “registered for the webinar” after they sign up for the webinar. You don’t have to just wait for them to show up at the webinar; you can set up an autoresponder sequence that goes out to those leads who have been tagged. This sequence will include useful information about eCommerce. This will help them get to know you better and increase the number of people who sign up for your webinar.

Even if some leads don’t buy from your webinar, giving them good content will keep them on your email list, where you can keep nurturing them with other automated sequences. This keeps them interested and makes them ready to buy when you have your next promotion.

Step 3: Set up email triggers

Triggers tell your marketing platform to send a certain message to a certain email list member. Your platform will work based on “if/then” rules like these: If a potential buyer downloads our how-to guide, they will automatically start getting our weekly educational emails on the same topic. Triggers make the customer journey more personalized, which is the opposite of those mass emails from your favorite clothing brand with a 50% discount. Smart Insights says that triggered emails have 71% more people open them and 102% more people click on them than regular email newsletters.

Step 4: Set up contact tags

As we’ve already talked about, segmenting is the best way to send emails that are relevant and interesting and get opened and clicked on. Tags are one of the simplest ways to divide your list into groups. For example, you could divide your audience into groups based on the form they used to sign up for your email list. In other words, your tag will answer the question “How did they get on my email list?” and make the content fit. Marketing automation can help you divide your lists automatically based on which links your subscribers clicked on.

Step 5: Use good email hygiene by cleaning your list

After all the work you put into building and keeping up your email list, the idea of removing people from it on purpose might seem like sacrilege. OptinMonster says that one-third of the people who sign up for your emails will never open them, let alone click through them. So, you need to “scrub” your email list every so often. Email scrubbing is the process of getting rid of people who aren’t interested in your emails so you can market to people who do want to get your emails. Make sure to clean your list a few times a year to keep your email reporting accurate and to keep your sender reputation score.

You don’t want to waste the time, effort, and money you put into email marketing on people who don’t want to hear from you. Also, most email marketing platforms charge you based on how many subscribers you have, so cleaning your email list makes sure you don’t pay for people who never open or click your emails. You can test your lead generation campaigns by using data and reports from email marketing. When it comes to marketing your business successfully, there are no “right answers.” Instead, there are only tried-and-true strategies that have been tested and improved. Tracking and reporting are important parts of any strategy for email marketing. By collecting data, you can make smart decisions about what to change, where to put more money, and what new strategies to try.

During your marketing activities, you should do the following tests. Email A/B testing also called “split testing” is when you compare two different versions of an email (version A and version B) to see which one works better. Two parts of your email list get Version A and Version B. Then, the “winning version,” which is the one with the most opens or clicks, is sent to the rest of your email subscribers.

Which parts of an email do you need to do A/B testing for?

• Email Subject
• From name (sender name)
• Email text
• Design
• Send time

Email KPIs

You may be able to get a lot of marketing metrics from your email marketing platform. Focus on these important metrics to avoid being overwhelmed and make marketing decisions quickly:

• Click-through Rate. Is the number of people who open your emails and click on links. One of the best ways to see how engaged your email list is is to look at the number of clicks. Different industries have different standards for what a “good” click-through rate is, so it’s important to know what they are.
• Conversion Rate. Tells you how many people took advantage of the offer in your email. If you send out an email about an upcoming webinar, the number of people who sign up for the webinar would be your conversion rate. Another important metric is the conversion rate, which shows how well your emails bring in leads.
• Bounce Rate. Is the total number of emails that were sent but could not be sent to the recipient’s inbox. If your bounce rate is too high or going up, it could mean that your sender’s reputation is in trouble.
• List Growth Rate. List-growth rate shows how quickly your email list is growing. People will naturally stop getting your emails over time (which is good if they’re not the right fit), so it’s important to keep adding new people. To figure out how fast your list is growing, take the number of new subscribers minus the number of people who dropped off, divide that number by the total number of email addresses on your list, and then multiply that number by 100.
• Open Rate. Open rate, which is the number of people who read your emails, used to be one of the easiest email metrics to track and use to figure out how well your campaigns were doing. But as of 2021, this is no longer true.

The bottom line on how to make your email marketing campaigns work best

Marketing campaigns don’t have to be hard or expensive to get people interested in the content you send them and ready to interact with it. In fact, if you make and promote a gated asset with a lot of value, like an online course, you can slowly build up a list of potential customers you can market to. The Hootsuite Academy taught students and customers how to use social media. This is how Hootsuite got more than 450,000 leads.