Create an email marketing plan for your startup with few resources
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Over 300 billion emails are sent daily. This represents 300 billion e-mails for a world population of more than 7 billion people.
If you haven’t considered email marketing for your new startup yet, you need to start now. One of the best things about email marketing is that it doesn’t require hiring a large and expensive communications team to design and implement an effective email strategy. So how do we do it?
Lean email stacks
To begin with, an email marketing stack needs to be created before you can send emails effectively. It may seem daunting, but at first there aren’t too many tools to configure.
To get started, all you need to do is connect the email signups you receive to an email marketing platform. The most likely places where emails are ingested early include:
If emails are ingested into a Google sheet, Zapier can easily connect those emails to your email marketing platform. CDPs (aka Segment) have the plug-and-play ability to send email to hundreds of integrations. CRMs (i.e. Hubspot) usually integrate email marketing into the platform, which makes it easy to get started quickly.
Related: Effective Email Strategies for Marketing Startups on a Budget
Top Email Types to Consider
Now that the email stack is set up, it’s time to start thinking about the email content that potential or current customers will receive. Although not an exhaustive list, the items below include some key themes:
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Informational
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social proof
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Feel good
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Discounts
For startups that have long flows, the informative The email field is a great way to push users through the funnel. While I was employed at Postmates on their fleet acquisition (driver) team, we had dedicated emails for each stage of the funnel that potential drivers got stuck on. This ranged from uploading a valid driver’s license to consenting to a background check. We focused our attention on the funnel stages that had the biggest drop and tested different ways to mitigate issues with different messaging styles.
social proof is a perfect example of a message that can dramatically improve a customer’s willingness to buy. Imagine you are about to buy a skincare product and then you receive a series of three emails featuring testimonials and success stories, with different types of people having success with the product. You would probably be much less skeptical and more willing to try it for yourself.
Although not necessary when trying to convert new customers, the feel good can help increase retention by validating a customer’s use. A prime example of this segment in action is grocery delivery startup, Instacart, and its clever use of a time-saving counter after ordering groceries.
To no one’s surprise, discounts are a great way to win, retain and even win back customers. It’s the ultimate trifecta. These discounts should be methodically tested to fully understand the per-message propensity and discount amount. During my time at Uber, the amount of testing we did would probably make everyone’s head spin, but it was necessary to move the conversion rate needle as much as possible.
Related: 3 Email Marketing Tactics You Need Most
Segmentation is gold
Ensuring that emails are sent to the right user segments is perhaps even more important than the type of message sent. Continuing with the Uber example, here are the types of inactive user segments we could reach:
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No passenger activity for more than 7 days
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No passenger activity for more than 30 days
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No runner activity since Covid
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App open but no running
Hundreds of other user segments were tested, but this helps show the level of granularity we used.
While that might sound extreme for a startup, it should help get the creative juices flowing on how to segment users for your own unique product or service. If you need additional guidance on segmentation – recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) is a great model to consider. The three questions to be answered with this model are:
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Recency: How long has a user made a purchase?
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Frequency: How often does this user buy?
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Monetary: How much is this user spending?
Related: 5 Tips for Better Email Marketing Performance
Determine success
There are three key metrics to consider for email marketing success: click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate (CVR), and unsubscribe rates. It’s tempting to build the perfect email marketing machine from the start, but I’d take an imperfect campaign deployed earlier.
Launch and iterate. That’s the name of the game with email marketing. As your email marketing progresses, you can start to get smarter with segments and start measuring incremental rise, fall, and various other data points.
One final thought: In the time it took you to read this, you’ll probably have received a few more emails. There’s a reason for that: companies know they work. You can also make it work.
