Many people talk about an email marketing strategy, but not everyone shares the details of how to write one.

I have been in email marketing since 2011. During this time, I shoveled 50 projects and wrote dozens of strategies for online stores, b2b sites, information portals, and travel agencies. I have accumulated experience and formed my own approach to business, which I will share in this article. In the end, I will give an example of a ready-made strategy in google dock. 

Hardware: what is strategy and is it always needed

In an email strategy, we outline goals and describe how the channel will evolve to achieve that goal. Strategies are usually quite voluminous, so I advise you to capture them in the document.

Strategy is not always needed. For a single mailing, you can definitely do without it. But if we have outlined a complex and long project, there is no way without a strategy. In it, we will describe all types of mailings, subscription forms, the logic of automatic emails, and other key elements of an email channel. 

The strategy is needed, first of all, for ourselves. This is a roadmap with which we will check during the implementation of the project. Also, the strategy is often shown to the management in order to agree on it and get the budget for the mailings.

Email is far from the only communication channel. We’re only going to talk about it, but keep in mind that this is only part of a comprehensive internet marketing strategy.

What we will talk about in the article:

Strategy itself

• Audit of the current situation
• Competitor overview
• Goal setting
• Planning

Important questions about strategy

• Depth of strategy detail
• Implementation features

Audit

Before starting to take action, you need to study the initial situation. We answer the question: what is there now?

Even if the company did not conduct emails, it will probably have some form of subscription or customer database. And in the “depths of history” you can also dig up attempts to send letters.

The purpose of the audit is to bring this data to the surface and understand where we start from. To do this, look:

• To our site and audience.
• Organization of the database by contacts.
• Ways to collect new subscribers.
• Mailing service, if we use.
• Types of letters we send.
• Email results – openings, clicks, conversions.

We’ve already covered how to audit email marketing and eliminate email weaknesses.

Competitor overview

When it comes to competitors, the term research is more common. But for me, this is too global for what we are going to do at this stage.

We will not hire an agency, study market shares, conduct large-scale surveys, and the like. We’ll just see what kind of emails our competitors are sending – reviewing their email marketing.

To do this, it is enough to start a couple of test boxes, browse competitors’ websites, fill out subscription forms and perform other targeted actions. Then we are waiting for what will happen next: what letters will come and how they will interact with us.

It is convenient to organize the survey results in a table. We enter there information on the subscription forms of competitors, their mailings, and other features. A scoring system can be used to formalize the overview — say, score each attribute between 0 and 5 points. Here 0 – the feature is completely absent, 5 – there is complete order with it!

Sometimes doubts arise: did we accurately check the presence of a sign? For example, we fail to “catch” automatic emails, although we think that a competitor has them. Or we may not subscribe to the newsletter, as the competitor makes it only for existing customers. In this case, you can put question marks – we have not yet clarified this point and, perhaps, we will return to it.

I’ve already written on my blog on how to review competitors’ email marketing.

Goal setting

Perhaps the most important stage of the strategy. A well-defined goal will help us determine the next steps. To make it easier, before that we carried out preparatory work.

The audit answered the question – what is there now?

During the review of competitors, we looked – how are they doing there?

To set a goal, we ask ourselves – what do we want to get?

The answer to this question should be specific enough. Sleek phrases like “increase sales” or “increase brand loyalty” are not appropriate. We need to choose a few key metrics that we will focus on.

The set of metrics will depend on the specifics of our project, but it is important that the metrics are specific, measurable and few in number. They might look like this:

• The growth rate of the subscriber base.
• Traffic attracted from email campaigns.
• The number of completed targeted actions from mailings (requests / orders).
• Income from these targeted actions.
• % of this income in the total turnover of the project.

Further we will evaluate many indicators, but these few should be the main ones. We will use them to monitor the results of the channel and understand if everything is in order.

Planning

We marked the starting point of the “route” and set the goal to which we want to arrive. It remains to figure out: how are we going to do this?

It’s time for the most meaningful part of the strategy – email marketing planning. We’ll break it down into the following substeps:

• Collecting the base.
• Segmentation.
• Mass mailings.
• Automatic letters.
• Measurement of results.

Now more about each of these points.

Base collection

Based on the results of the audit, we became aware of the situation with the collection of the subscriber base. 

In this section, we’ll describe the strategies for how we will refine the current subscription methods and what additional forms we will add to the site in order to collect contacts more efficiently.

It can be:

• Subscription bonus popup.
• Static subscription form on every page of the site.
• Checkboxes for subscription in other forms – registration, feedback, order, or application for service.

Segmentation

We need to divide the received contacts into segments. These are groups of people whom we divide according to some criterion. This will increase the accuracy and efficiency of communications with subscribers.

For example, we can highlight the following segments in the database:

• Subscribed, but have not yet completed the target action.
• Completed the target action the first time, but not the second time.
• Completed the target action a second time, not the third time.
• The target action was performed three or more times.

By targeted action we mean what brings the project income: an order in an online store, an application for a service, and so on.

The selection of segments will show us what other data needs to be collected about subscribers.

In the example above, we need to track how subscribers perform the targeted action. We will add this information to the profile of each user. 

At this stage, you can think about how to interact with each segment: what letters to send and what to do so that the subscriber moves from one segment to another.

Bulk mailings

By mass mailing we mean sending letters to the entire subscriber base at once or to some significant part of it.

At the stage of developing a strategy, it is necessary to decide whether we will do such mailings, whether we have the resources and capabilities for this.

It is not necessary to send bulk emails – you can build email marketing only on automatic emails, which we will discuss below. An illustrative case on this topic: the MuzZone online store increased its income from 500 thousand to 4 million rubles a month thanks to automatic emails.

If bulk emails become part of the strategy, then you need to decide what content we will send to subscribers, how often, and who will be responsible for sending the emails.

We select topics and headings for letters with an eye to the fact that we have to do dozens of newsletter issues. We do not have to “fizzle out” during the first few months.

The set of headings for letters can be as follows:

• Information about products.
• Promotions, discounts, special offers, other marketing activities.
• Project news.

If you’re thinking about what to write to your subscribers, read our article on 50 ideas for newsletter content.

At this stage, you need to decide whether we will include useful information in the mailing list or limit ourselves only to commercial offers. Content mailings require something worthwhile for subscribers: expert articles, videos, some kind of “insider” information from the industry. Decide if you have this information and can produce it on a regular basis.

Automatic letters

Next, we have to decide on a set of automatic letters that we will send to subscribers. These letters come when users perform different actions on the site: register, order a product, subscribe to a newsletter.

We can make automation the main tool for working with segments. Here are examples of several automated scripts:

• Welcome series for new subscribers – we introduce the project, bring it to the target action.
• Do not perform the target action – we remind about it.
• We completed the target action for the first time – we thank, request feedback, stimulate the implementation of the target action a second time …

It is convenient to depict the selected scenarios on the diagram so that you can see how they work in conjunction:

Measuring Results

Finally, it remains for us to decide how often and how we will measure key metrics, what auxiliary metrics we need for this, and in what order we will measure.

For example, to understand the rate of base growth, you can estimate:

• The number of subscribers through different subscription forms (pop-up, static).
• The number of new subscribers per week / month.
• Conversion to a subscription based on website traffic.
• Number of unsubscribers, spam complaints and technical delivery failures.
• The ratio of growth and loss of the base for a week / month.

And so on for all aspects of email marketing, we implement mass mailings, mailings by segment, various automatic emails.

How much to granularize the strategy

When preparing a strategy, the problem of detailing often arises – how much to describe the stages that we are going to implement.

On the one hand, a greater degree of detail will make the strategy heavier. It will be more difficult for us to compose it, more difficult to present – no one will carefully read a document of several tens of pages. And it is hardly possible to think over everything to the smallest detail. In the process of implementation, circumstances will change and our detailed plan will not be feasible.

On the other hand, you can go to the other extreme: outline the strategy in too general terms, without any details in principle. In this case, our plan will be less valuable. Along the way, we will have to roll back to the planning stage again and again and finish what was not done in the beginning.

When working on a strategy, you should stick to the golden mean. For example, we do not need to thoroughly prescribe the content of automatic letters, but it is advisable to decide on their number and types right away:

The same applies to the technical side of the issue. We don’t have to immediately choose a newsletter service, form builders or block editors. But they can be kept in mind when drawing up a strategy. The more we know about the real possibilities of existing technical means – services, programs – the closer to reality we will write a strategy. In order not to find out in hindsight that we physically cannot “pull up” product reviews in letters and implement other things that are described in the strategy.

A good test of whether a strategy is overloaded with details or not is its scope. In my opinion, a document of 10-15 (maximum 20) pages is enough to adequately describe the entire action plan.

Based on the results of working on strategies, we can get the following document:

Example of an email marketing strategy (Google doc).

An example of an email marketing strategy (UniSender blog post).

The example is prepared for a conditional online store that is just launching mailing lists.

Implementation

Having a well-thought-out strategy is good, but it is even more important to implement it.

It is not enough to write that we are going to replenish the database using a pop-up window. It is also necessary to place this window on the site, to establish its “connection” with the mailing service and make sure that it does not bother users too much.

And so in all parts of the plan.

Create a strategy for specific circumstances and a team that will implement it. If we have a designer, layout designer and programmer, we will include sections on beautiful letter templates and complex automated scripts in the strategy. If it is known that a project is without a programmer, the plan will change: we will simplify automation and use ready-made solutions.

The authors of the strategy must remain participants in the process, control its implementation. A strategy divorced from implementation runs the risk of being left as a collection of pictures and text on a computer screen or a useless stack of paper.

It is best to write the strategy yourself. If we turn to a specialist or an agency, then it is worth discussing not a strategy, but the introduction of a comprehensive turnkey service. The preparation of the strategy in this case will be only one of the stages of work, then it needs to be implemented. In a separate article, I have analyzed what stages include turnkey email marketing and what to look for when contacting an agency.