How to Create an Email Marketing Plan in 2022

Learn how to create an email marketing plan that drives engagement and conversions. The Ascent outlines several tips to help you create a successful email marketing plan.

Email marketing remains a staple for marketers, even with the emergence of new marketing methods. In fact, email marketing beats social media in terms of winning new customers. Sixty percent of consumers prefer to subscribe to a mailing list to receive offers or promotions.

Additionally, email produces the highest return on investment among marketing channels, generating an average of $38 for every dollar spent. This is why most B2C and B2B companies invest in email marketing plans to generate more sales and increase brand awareness.

Overview: What is an email marketing plan?

An email marketing plan outlines the steps for implementing an email marketing strategy. Either prepare an email marketing plan or pilot it. If you want to see email marketing channels, choose the former.

Having a plan gives you a better idea of ​​the problems you need to address, the type of email content you need to create, and your audience, among other things.

A well-thought-out marketing plan allows you to reach the right audience with the right message at the right time. These are all crucial elements for successful email marketing campaigns.

How to Create an Email Marketing Plan for Your Business

Email marketing is not just about sending emails to a list of contacts. Follow the steps below to create an email marketing plan that drives meaningful results.

1. Define your goals

If you don’t know why you’re emailing, a disconnect will occur between your email content and your subscribers’ needs.

This disconnect can cause your subscribers to ignore your future emails, unsubscribe, or worse, report you as spam, which can be avoided if you start with a clear goal.

When setting goals, think about who you want to reach, what you want to tell them, and how you hope they respond. Refine your goals by asking the following questions:

• Who? Identify your target audience. Find out their pain points, aspirations, and the emotional/psychological triggers that drive them to act on your offers.
• What? What do you want your contacts to do with your email? Do you want them to download your content, subscribe to your webinar, or register for an event? Set a goal for each email so you can add a clear call to action (CTA).
• When? Determine which types of content are relevant to your subscribers based on the stage of the buyer’s journey they are in. For example, someone in the awareness phase prefers to receive insightful content about a product or service. Meanwhile, someone at the decision stage will find pricing guides more valuable.
• Where? Determine which device your email subscribers use to open your emails. Do they use smartphones? Laptop ? Or tablets, perhaps? Use your email service provider’s email analytics to get this information to optimize your email marketing campaign accordingly.
• Why? What is the desired outcome for your email marketing campaign? Does it align with the overall direction of your business? Asking these types of questions will build cohesion between your email marketing campaigns and any other promotional initiatives you pursue to grow your business.

2. Develop and segment your contacts

Learning how to build an email list doesn’t have to be rocket science.

Offering a lead magnet, for example, can do wonders for your list building efforts. When you offer a lead magnet that offers tons of value, your audience is more likely to share their email addresses.

The most common lead magnets offered are:

• Templates or resources
• Electronic books
• Free trials or samples
• Discounts
• Webinars

However, getting your prospects’ email addresses is only half the battle. If you want to convert your email leads into paying customers, you need to learn how to segment your audience.

Email segmentation consists of grouping email addresses according to a sub-niche. Some of the most common segmentation ideas are sorting by gender, age, interests, and behavior. Choose the type of segmentation that matches your data and goals.

Email segmentation allows you to create personalized content since you can tailor it specifically to the interest of the sub-niche. As a result, segmented or targeted campaigns increase click-through and open rates and drive 77% of your overall ROI.

3. Create value-rich emails

Your content should be relevant and useful to your subscribers. To find out what content works for them, create your marketing materials based on their stage of purchase. The structure of your email content is also important.

Use the AIDA template to organize the structure of your email templates. AIDA means:

• Attention: Grab the reader’s attention with your subject line or header.
• The interest: Give relevance to keep readers interested.
• Desire: Show the value of your product or service.
• Stock: Encourage them to take action.

Here’s what it looks like when you apply the AIDA template to your email.

The simple Foodpanda email promotion used the AIDA model to deliver their content effectively. Image source: author

Notice how the email template is short and simple, yet conveys clear information and encourages the reader to take action.

Remember that the best marketing emails are about giving value to readers.

4. Optimize email deliverability

Email deliverability is a metric that shows how many of your emails are reaching your recipients’ inboxes. Pay attention to this metric if you want your email marketing campaigns to succeed. After all, if your emails aren’t in your subscribers’ inboxes, they won’t be opened or read.

To optimize your email deliverability, consider the following email marketing tips:

• Collect emails with consent: Before sending a sequence of emails to a customer, get their permission first. Otherwise, they might flag you as spam, which hurts your sending reputation and email deliverability. Use a double opt-in if possible.
• Segment according to audience expectations: Are your subscribers receiving the email content they expected to receive? Also, have you taken the time to remind them who you are and why they are receiving your emails? Make sure your emails match your audience’s expectations. If they’ve signed up to receive real estate investing tips and tricks, don’t send them emails about home painting tips. Although both emails are about homes, investing and painting advice are two very different worlds. Your audience will unsubscribe or mark you as spam if they receive email content that doesn’t meet their expectations. It doesn’t matter whether you are aware of the disconnection or not, your email deliverability will suffer.
• Watch for hard rebounds: Hard bounces can cause serious damage to your email deliverability. Left unchecked, they can wreck your email marketing campaigns. Essentially, hard bounces are emails that are bounced (or undelivered) for permanent reasons. The recipient’s email can be invalid, disabled, etc. To manage your hard bounces, use email marketing software that monitors delivery. Test your emails before sending them in bulk, use double opt-ins or check spam databases – all of these can give you an edge to avoid hard bounces.

5. Automate your campaigns

Automating your emails allows you to scale your campaigns while streamlining your process. Due to the “set-it-and-forget-it” nature of email automation, your campaigns can run without your constant attention. You just need to do the initial setup and they will work 24/7.

For example, use email automation to send welcome emails whenever someone signs up for your newsletters. Automated welcome messages allow you to onboard new subscribers without manually sending emails every time someone signs up – your email automation software will do it all for you.

An email system like Mailchimp lets you do this easily. The platform offers several email automation templates that you can choose from.

Use email automation templates to speed up the creation of your email marketing campaign. Image source: author

After selecting a template, start adding your content, audience, and when your email will be sent.

Specify the timing of your automated emails to give it more punch. Image source: author

Using email automation saves you a lot of time and headaches while ensuring you stay on top of your email marketing campaigns.

Plus, setting up behavior-based automation, like birthday greetings, allows you to send highly relevant emails to your contacts at the right time.

Zalora sends automated birthday wishes and offers an exclusive discount to encourage subscribers to purchase. Image source: author

Notice how Zalora capitalizes on their subscriber’s birthday by offering a 27% discount to encourage a purchase.

Use email automation to your advantage to ensure continuous email communication and drive more engagement.

Create an email marketing plan that engages and converts

Maximize the customer lifetime value of your subscribers by creating a successful email marketing plan.

Follow the steps mentioned in the guide and expand on them to create an email marketing plan that fits the dynamics of your business.