Email marketing combines creativity with data to generate revenue for your business. It’s flexible, can be automated, and is easy to scale. But getting consistent, predictable revenue demands a holistic email marketing campaign strategy.
Marketers need a defined strategy to make the most out of every email campaign. Here’s the issue—email marketing is a spectrum. Cold outreach vastly differs from newsletters or other nurturing campaigns.
The good news is that there are fundamental strategies that work regardless of the email marketing campaign we’re running. We’re here to break those strategies down! By the end of this article, you’ll learn:
- The basics of an email marketing campaign strategy
- Actionable examples of email marketing strategies
- Email marketing best practices
Email Marketing Strategy 101: Campaign Fundamentals
Every email marketing campaign requires two things—a sender and a receiver. Groundbreaking right? Senders want the highest deliverability possible. We achieve this through email warmups, authentication, and lead verification.
Lead segmentation and qualification is the second important fundamental. You don’t want to send another cold email to prospects already in your newsletter funnel. SDRs shouldn’t waste much effort on leads who aren’t qualified to purchase your product/service.
Most of the strategies we’ll discuss will focus on these two fundamentals. The rest covers strategies for getting higher opens, conversions, and reply rates. As a bonus, we’ll discuss reducing churn rates and improving existing customers' average order value (AOV).
Actionable Email Marketing Campaign Strategy Examples
Whether you send cold emails, newsletters, or nurturing sequence campaigns to bottom-of-the-funnel prospects, the following strategies will help you craft compelling, engaging, and reply-worthy emails.
Segment Prospects for Each Campaign
Most people use email marketing as an opportunity to gain something from prospects. However, it should be used to bring value to our prospects. But how do we know what’s most valuable?
The answer is segmentation. Segmenting our prospects ensures we send the right emails to the right people. Research from Campaign Monitor suggested segmentation increases email revenue by 760%.
Marketers can segment email lists by industry, company size, or sales cycle. If you have a CRM or analytics, you can segment by customer behavior, intent data, purchase history, or email open rates. Segmentation also helps us to qualify better and personalize emails at scale.
Personalize Emails at Scale
In a perfect world, we can personalize every email we send. That won’t ever be the case. The best we can do is to personalize based on our segmented lists.
For example, businesses within the same industry will likely have similar pain points. But that’s still too general. How about company size? Even in the same industry, bigger companies would have different pain points than smaller ones.
Now, you’d have two campaigns for the same industry, targeting different company sizes. This way, your email copy can be better personalized and curated. The best way to personalize at scale is by leveraging automation and email marketing software.
Leverage Email Marketing Software Automation + Triggers
Email marketing software helps you run campaigns on auto-pilot. Tools like Instantly allow users to personalize emails at scale using {{merge tags}}. Every part of an email can be personalized, from the subject lines to the CTAs.
You’d also need email marketing software to send emails based on user behavior or activity. Send a welcome email to prospects when they buy a product, subscribe to a service, or join your newsletter. Triggers also work best for abandoned carts and purchase intent.
With Instantly, you can import data directly from CRMs like HubSpot, SalesForce, and Pipedrive. Plus, users can trigger actions in Zapier based on custom labels, automating every transactional email.
Take Advantage of High-Open Rate Transactional Emails
Transactional emails have 4-9x higher open rates compared to other types of emails. Don’t just waste that with a “Thank You” email. Instead, use it to increase brand loyalty and your customer’s average order value (AOV).
For example, post-purchase confirmation emails for loyal customers can include special discounts or promos for relevant products. Think of ways to upsell or cross-sell. Relevance is key. You don’t want to push products in customers' faces who just bought something.
On top of trigger-based transactional emails and automation features, users gain access to analytics, A/B testing, and advanced optimization—one of the most underutilized being mobile optimizations.
Optimize Emails for Mobile Users
Many relate to having phones beside us, even lying in bed. It’s no surprise that 50% of customers purchase through mobile websites. Imagine receiving a discount promo for a product you’ve wanted to buy. That’s just a few clicks away, so why not believe it, right?
Here’s where you can gain an advantage. SupperOffice did a study suggesting that 20% of email marketing campaigns aren’t optimized for mobile users. That’s a lot of potential revenue you’re missing out on.
To optimize for mobile email campaigns, do the following:
- Use responsive email design (RED): This means creating a dynamic email design optimized for your prospects regardless of their device
- Create short but engaging subject lines
- Optimize your email snippet: This is typically the first few lines of your email copy. However, your email marketing software can help you edit it through HTML.
- Make CTAs stand out. Try larger buttons or bold colors. And make them easy to click.
Remember, your CTA is one of the many variables to consider in an email. We can find out which email variable performs best with the help of A/B testing.
A/B Test Elements of Your Email Copy
The best email marketing campaign strategies are dynamic. If a subject line doesn’t work, try another one. Do your CTAs have low click rates? Maybe they need more optimization.
Here’s the best part: you don’t need campaigns to run their course to find your best-performing emails. That’s where A/B testing comes in.
A/B testing pits one email against another to help you find the best parts of each. Let’s say you’re sending cold emails to 5,000 leads. Half of the leads get email variation A, the other B.
Looking at the analytics, you might find that email B has 15% more opens than email A. When you see a significant increase like this, it’s better to send email B to the rest of your leads.
A-Z Testing + Auto Optimizations
If you use Instantly, you gain access to A-Z testing. Users can create email variations within sequences and test every part of their email without a new campaign.
You can create variations right from your email editor. Every sequence can have its email variations. That means you can test the subject lines of your cold emails, the copy of your follow-ups, or the effectiveness of your CTAs.
There’s also an option to auto-optimize campaigns based on the results of your A-Z testing. When Instantly detects one email performing better than the others, it automatically closes poor-performing emails and sends out the best ones.
Aside from monitoring email performance, you should also watch active vs inactive leads.
Segmenting and Re-Engaging with Inactive Prospects
Email marketing works best with volume. But we don’t want to send emails to every prospect, especially those that don’t even open our emails.
Doing so hurts our deliverability rates, which signals email service providers that we might be sending spam. The best way to avoid this is by segmenting inactive subscribers.
These inactive subscriber segments should be placed in a “re-engagement campaign.” You can offer discounts or promos to keep them interested in your brand.
Make sure to add an opt-out link for these emails. If they choose to opt-out, purge them from your email list. Do the same if they don’t respond. But be sure to offer value to active prospects.
Promote Brand Loyalty In Your Email Marketing Campaigns.
Brand loyalty further improves your customer’s AOV. It can even turn your customer base into a community that generates a positive feedback loop of user-generated content (UGC) you can use in all marketing campaigns, including email.
But, to get this much value from customers, you must also give value. Think of special offers, thank you emails, implementing ideas from user feedback, or giving back to your community.
All of these strategies help you create a holistic email marketing campaign. However, you should always take advantage of the fundamentals.
Fundamental Email Marketing Campaign Strategies
You can’t neglect email marketing fundamentals, regardless of the type of campaign. Here are the five non-negotiable email campaign strategies you should consistently implement:
Email Warmup
Warmups aren’t exclusive to cold email outreach. Suppose you send a newsletter, and only 40% of subscribers open it. When you’ve fixed what went wrong in the email copy, your deliverability rates could already take a hit. This won’t be an issue with email warmup.
It helps balance out the harmful effects of email marketing, especially cold emails. Email accounts warm up naturally through exchanges over time, but this can be automated with the help of email marketing software.
With Instantly, you get unlimited warmups for unlimited sending accounts. Each account will be part of a pool of thousands of other Instantly users, each sending and replying positively to emails. Once warmup is activated, you can leave it on for as long as you want.
Domain Authentication
Always authenticate new sending domains. Authentication allows your domains to receive emails and signals to email providers that the emails you send are trustworthy.
You can even take this further and set up BIMI for your domains. Building BIMI establishes your sending accounts as an authority, significantly improving deliverability.
We need four main authentications for email marketing—MX, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. MX records allow us to receive emails. SPF enables us to send emails.
DKIM records add a signature to our emails, signaling that what we send is authorized and not spam. DMARC authenticates emails, signaling to service providers our domains are legitimate.
Subject Line Optimization
This sounds like a broken record, but many marketers still don’t optimize subject lines. No matter the industry, the recipe for a good subject line will always be personalization + relevancy + engagement.
More importantly, stop using “Quick question.” as your subject lines. No level of personalization and relevancy can save your emails if you go with that. As always, leverage your email automation tools to personalize emails at scale. Then, A/B test is used to find the best subject lines.
Quality Lead Sourcing
Email marketing campaigns are only as effective as the quality of leads you add. Many quality leads come from lead capture pages and other inbound marketing campaigns.
But just because they’re interested in your offer doesn’t mean they’re qualified to purchase. So, remember to qualify leads and verify if their emails are accurate.
If you want to streamline this process, try Instantly B2B Lead Finder. Users gain access to a database of over 160 million pre-verified B2B leads.
Then, you can find leads that match your exact buyer personas and ICPs with advanced search filters, keywords, or client lookalikes. With quality leads, all that’s left is to focus on your emails.
Focus on Deliverability
Since we’re working with volume, we want the highest possible deliverability rates. The best email copy won’t matter if it doesn’t land in our prospects’ inbox. To ensure high deliverability, consider these best practices:
- Warmup sending accounts before running email campaigns
- Try using plain text emails instead of HTML
- Authenticate email domains
- Keep email lists clean by removing inactive subscribers
- Avoid using spam words in your subject lines
Key Takeaways
Email marketing is one of the best marketing strategies out there. Every type of business can use it. Campaigns can be automated, monitored through analytics, and scaled. You only need to add more leads, domains, and sending accounts as you grow.
But, an email marketing campaign works best when paired with a holistic strategy. Here are the ones you should consider implementing:
- Segment and qualify leads to improve personalization and open rates
- Leverage email software to automate trigger-based emails, sequences, or follow-ups
- Take advantage of high-open rate transactional emails to improve customer AOV
- Optimize emails for mobile users
- A/B test emails to continuously iterate on the best ones
Regarding email marketing, you’ll need an automation tool to scale campaigns as you grow. That’s where Instantly comes in. Find the perfect leads, run automated email marketing campaigns, and grow faster than before! Try it out for free today.