Email Marketing: Getting Started with a Winning Strategy

Email marketing is no longer just a technology for sending messages. It has become the most powerful conversion tool at your disposal for turning cold prospects into loyal, profitable customers. According to the Direct Marketing Association's quarterly study, email marketing generates on average the highest return on investment (ROI) per euro spent compared with every other form of digital marketing.

Yet 87% of businesses that fail at their email strategy make the same fundamental mistakes right from the start. They neglect basic marketing principles, ignore the legal side, and above all, they don't understand how to build a lasting relationship of trust with their audience.

In this in-depth guide, we explore how to build an email marketing strategy that not only complies with current regulations but also delivers measurable, lasting results for your business. Whether you're an entrepreneur, a marketing manager or the head of a small business, this methodical approach will give you all the tools you need to dominate your market with email marketing.

Integrating Email into Your Marketing Mix

Email Marketing in Today's Digital Ecosystem

Integrating email into your marketing mix isn't simply a matter of moving your traditional advertising messages into an electronic format. Maximizing your business's email potential involves two crucial, ongoing tasks:

Analyzing the strengths and limitations of each tool and media type in your marketing mix. Every channel has its own strengths: social media excels at awareness, SEO at discoverability, but email remains the undisputed champion of direct conversion.

Developing consistent messages that work together across several media types to reach your goals. Email then becomes the nerve center that amplifies the effectiveness of all your other channels.

A successful digital marketing strategy uses email as a targeted follow-up tool to maximize the return on investment of all your marketing efforts. Here's how to go about it:

Combining Email with Other Channels

Using email for targeted follow-up is one of the best ways to maximize your overall return on the marketing euros you spend. Let's take a concrete example:

Step 1: Initial Contact Through Traditional Media Your business uses traditional media to make first contact with new prospects. For example, if you run a pizzeria, you might station an employee holding a sign on a busy street to catch the attention of potential customers.

Step 2: Collecting Qualified Information You collect the contact details and interests of the prospects who respond to your initial outreach. In exchange for a free slice of pizza, you ask for an email address and what kind of coupons they'd like to receive by email.

Step 3: Personalized Emails Based on the Data You send emails containing personalized messages based on the information you collected. If your potential customer says they're interested in chicken wings, you can send coupons for... chicken wings. You can also ask your customer to print the menu included in the email and forward your offer to a friend.

This approach can turn a one-off contact into a series of conversions thanks to smart email follow-up and personalized content creation.

Building a Consistent Brand Across All Media

In marketing, you'll probably use several tools, media types and messages over periods of days, weeks, months and years to communicate everything needed to attract and retain enough customers. Keeping your design elements and the personality of your messages consistent over time — branding — reinforces each of your messages and makes every subsequent message more memorable for your audience.

Consumers are more likely to respond positively to your email messages when they can recognize your brand and when the content of each message feels familiar to them.

Essential Branding Elements:

A Recognizable, Legible Logo: Your logo must be clearly visible in every print and digital format, with color schemes that work both online and on paper. Make sure your logo and colors stay consistent across:

• Your website
• Social media
• Online directories
• Email sign-up forms
• Mobile websites
• Business cards
• Emails

Your Business Name Everywhere: Include your business name in all your marketing, especially in the "From" lines of your emails, your email addresses, your email signature, online directories and your blog.

Consistently Formatted Messages: When you repeat messages across several media types, make sure the following elements are formatted consistently in your emails: fonts, layouts, images, headlines, contact information and calls to action.

Applying Basic Marketing Principles to Your Email Messages

Persuading consumers to spend their money on your products or services usually involves communicating one of these two fundamental messages:

Your products or services are unique and unfamiliar to consumers. Your challenge is to educate the consumers who are likely to need your products or services so that they buy from you.

Your products or services are easily recognizable and widely available. Your challenge is to convince consumers that your business is the best choice among the competition.

The Strategic Marketing Message Cycle

Marketing message strategy is a continuous cycle with three fundamental steps:

1. Determine your message and the best audience for it
2. Deliver your message using the media best suited to your audience and your message
3. Evaluate your results and apply what you've learned to determine your next message

Deciding What Your Email Messages Say

Email is an excellent marketing tool, but you can't just send any email message several times and expect it to generate sales. Keep your email messages as concise as possible; people usually scan emails rather than taking the time to read every word.

The Essential Minimum Content:

Your Value Proposition: A statement that tells consumers why your products or services are worth paying for. A good value proposition shows consumers that your products or services solve a problem or meet a need better than anyone else.

Examples of effective value propositions:

• "Don't put Rover in a kennel for the holidays. Our pet-sitting services make your vacation worry-free and let your pets enjoy the holidays too — in the comfort of their own home."
• "Want it tomorrow? Our free shipping is the fastest available."
• "Our home equity loans can help you pay off high-interest debt, and our service is more personal than the big banks."

Information to Support Your Value Proposition: Value propositions rarely prompt someone to make an immediate purchase on their own. Most of the time, you need to back up your value proposition with additional information to convince buyers to act.

Examples of supporting information:

• Testimonials and facts
• Directions to your office, store or website
• Incentives to help someone justify taking action
• Images and other design elements to reinforce the text

One or More Calls to Action: A call to action is a statement that asks someone to take a specific type of action in a specific way. Calls to action matter because people tend to delete emails after reading them if they aren't told what to do next.

For businesses that need a more sophisticated technical approach, integrating email verification and cleaning tools into your strategy can significantly improve your deliverability rates — and therefore your conversions.

Deciding How Your Email Messages Look

Design elements such as images and colors are important parts of every email message because they can reinforce the words you use or give your words a different feel for the reader.

A text-only email not only fails to reinforce and enhance your value proposition, it's also hard to scan and read. Even simple design elements can have a significant impact on the look and feel of an email message.

Questions to Help You Decide on the Look:

• What emotions or circumstances lead people to think about your products or services?
• Which words, fonts, images and colors convey those emotions and circumstances?
• What other media do you use to deliver your messages?
• What limitations and advantages of each medium might affect how your messages look?

Targeting Your Email Messages

When you're passionate about your business, it's easy to think of almost everyone as a potential prospect. You may well be able to identify a broad audience that needs your products or services, but many people won't buy from you for one reason or another.

Essential Targeting Questions:

• Who is most likely to need your products or services?
• Who already buys other products or services similar or identical to yours?
• Who buys other products or services that could be seen as substitutes for yours?
• Who buys products or services that complement yours?
• Who has already bought from you, and when will they be ready to buy again?

Developing Email Content That Matches How Consumers Interact

Your email content should match the way consumers tend to interact with the media you use, so that your audience can easily absorb and act on your message.

People interact with emails much the same way they interact with billboards: they tend to scan an email's content quickly to see whether anything is worth responding to or reading in detail.

Be sure to use headlines, images, links and text in ways that let members of your audience absorb your message while they scan.

Reaping the Benefits of Email Marketing

Email may look like a cost-effective way to deliver your marketing messages. For the most part, it is cost-effective because you can send personalized, targeted, interest-specific messages to a large number of people. The value of email marketing doesn't stop at cost, however.

Asking for Immediate Action

You won't have to wait very long to find out whether an email message was successful. According to MarketingSherpa's "Email Marketing Benchmark Report", 80% of the emails you send are opened within the first 48 hours after delivery.

Once an email is opened, it doesn't take long for your audience to act immediately, because people can act on an email with a single mouse click.

Possible Immediate Actions:

• Opening and reading the email
• Clicking a link
• Clicking a Reply button
• Forwarding or sharing
• Printing the email
• Saving the email

Gathering Feedback

Email is a two-way form of communication, and even commercial email can be used to gather feedback and responses from your audience. People can easily reply to emails, and many consumers love sharing their opinions when it's easy for them.

Two Categories of Feedback:

Stated Feedback - when someone:

• Fills out an online form
• Completes an online survey
• Sends a reply or leaves a comment

Behavioral Feedback - when you track:

• Link clicks
• Email open rates
• Emails shared with friends

Generating Awareness

When was the last time you sent out thousands of postcards and your customers started gathering around photocopiers trying to duplicate the postcard so they could stick stamps on it and pass the message on to their friends?

Email programs have a Forward button that lets users easily send a copy of your email to one or more people in your recipient's address book.

Staying Top of Mind

If you send periodic emails with valuable content, people who aren't ready to buy right away are more likely to remember you and your business when they are ready to buy.

Making the Most of Email Marketing Providers

The days when you could send a single email and BCC hundreds of other people are over. Spam filters, firewalls, junk folders and consumer distrust are all reasons to turn to professionals for help with your email strategy.

Email Marketing Providers (EMPs) are companies that provide one or more of the following commercial email services:

• Improving email deliverability
• Database and list management
• Email template design
• Social media integration
• Formatting for mobile devices
• Email message and content creation
• Reporting and tracking
• Advice and consulting

Benefits of EMPs

Giving Your Business a Professional Look: EMPs can help you create excellent email communications without any programming knowledge on your part. Most EMPs provide templates with user-friendly layouts to accommodate any type of message.

Keeping Your Marketing Legal: EMPs are required to build current email laws into their products so that their customers can easily comply. Reputable EMPs go beyond the basic legal requirements and adhere to higher professional standards in line with consumer preferences.

Helping You with Logistics and Reporting: EMPs can help you manage the data and feedback associated with running your email strategy. For businesses handling large volumes of email, using a professional email verifier becomes essential to maintaining an optimal sender reputation.

Helping You with Content: EMPs want you to succeed, because if your email messages are effective, you'll probably reward your EMP by being a loyal customer. Many EMPs have resources available that will help you develop your content and follow best practices.

Teaching You Best Practices: EMPs can give you valuable insights into consumer preferences that would be too expensive or impossible to obtain on your own.

Maximizing Revenue with Email

Increasing Revenue from Repeat Customers

You don't need to be in business very long before you realize that repeat customers matter. If you've been in business for a while, you may even know the average number of times a customer comes back and the total value of the average loyal customer over time.

Staying in front of your customers with valuable periodic emails is probably one of the best things you can do to build loyalty, repeat sales and referrals. Repeat customers are more likely than cold prospects to make immediate purchases in response to a single message.

Understanding the Value of Repeat Customers

Repeat customers aren't just easier to win than first-time customers — it's also far more profitable to do business with repeat customers than with cold prospects.

How Repeat Customers Help Your Business Grow:

Customer Acquisition Cost: A first-time customer usually represents a cost to your business rather than a profit. After spending so much money on awareness, the first 100 people who buy represent a loss for the business if you spend more on awareness than the profit it generates.

Base Profit: Your base profit is the amount of money left after paying all your expenses. Base profit grows incrementally as the number of profitable purchases increases.

Profit from Increased Purchases: Profits rise above base profits once your fixed costs are covered, and each additional purchase results in a smaller percentage of revenue going to fixed costs.

Profit from Reduced Operating Costs: As repeat customers become more familiar with your business, they don't need as much hand-holding as new customers.

Profit from Referrals: The more often your customers interact with your business and your products and services, the more likely they are to share their experiences with their peers.

Profit from Price Premiums: Competing on price is a curse for some small businesses. Repeat customers who trust you aren't as willing as first-time customers to take their business to your competitors when your prices are a little higher.

Becoming a Trusted Sender

Minimizing Spam Complaints

Spam is also known as unsolicited commercial email. Although many stories, analogies and myths exist about the origin and meaning of the term spam, one thing is certain — consumers don't like receiving it.

Even if your email doesn't meet the legal definition of spam, consumers can easily report your email as spam and thereby hinder your ability to send emails in the future.

Why Consumers See Emails as Spam:

• I don't want it: Unwanted marketing emails are seen as spam by most consumers
• I can't verify it: If consumers can't tell whether an email comes from a legitimate source, they see it as spam
• I think it's too frequent: Consumers tend to see frequent emails as spam when they feel the content is irrelevant, repetitive or too long

Complying with Anti-Spam Laws

Spam is enough of a nuisance that lawmakers enacted the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 to help prosecute spammers. The acronym comes from its official title, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003.

Main Requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act:

Provide a Way to Unsubscribe: You're required to permanently remove anyone who unsubscribes from your email list within ten days of the unsubscribe request.

Include Your Physical Address: If your business has several locations, include your main address or the physical address associated with each email you send.

Clearly Identify Your Business: Make sure your email's header information clearly identifies your business and doesn't mislead your audience in any way.

A Non-Deceptive Subject Line: Don't use your subject line to trick your audience into opening your email or to misrepresent the offer contained in your email.

For businesses that handle large volumes of email, regular email list cleaning becomes an absolute necessity to stay legally compliant and optimize deliverability.

Making Your Emails More Professional

Understanding and following the principles of the CAN-SPAM Act are important tasks, but you won't impress many consumers if your emails are merely CAN-SPAM compliant.

Recommended Professional Practices:

Full Disclosure When Collecting Email Addresses: Wherever you collect email addresses, ask for explicit permission to send emails. Also keep a record of your permission exchanges in case you face a legal complaint in the future.

Letting People Unsubscribe: The most professional practice is to use an Email Marketing Provider to automatically and permanently remove anyone who unsubscribes from all email lists by clicking a link.

Sending Email Content That Matches Your Audience's Expectations: Include a description of your email content and your typical sending frequency in your sign-up process. Only send the content your email subscribers expect to receive.

Deciding When and How Often to Send

Consumers tend to see emails that arrive too often as spam, so you need to decide on the frequency and timing of your emails. Frequency refers to the number of emails you send and the amount of time between each email you send.

Consumers are willing to receive emails at almost any frequency as long as the message content stays relevant and valuable to them.

Factors That Influence Perceived Frequency:

• The total number of emails
• The length of each email
• How often you ask them to take action
• The relevance of the information you provide
• Timing

Transform Your Email Marketing Approach Today

Email marketing is no longer optional — it's a strategic necessity for any business that wants to thrive in the digital economy. Every day without an optimized email strategy means dozens of potential conversions slipping away to more agile competitors.

Your Immediate Action Plan

Step 1: Audit Your Current Strategy

• Assess the legal compliance of your practices
• Analyze your open and conversion rates
• Identify the leaks in your conversion funnel

Step 2: Optimize Your Infrastructure

• Clean your lists with a professional email verifier
• Set up an automated cleaning system
• Integrate your complete verification solution

Step 3: Launch Your Winning Strategy

• Apply the fundamental marketing principles
• Comply with current regulations
• Continuously measure and optimize your results

Need Professional Support?

As a specialist in web development and digital strategy, I help businesses transform their email marketing approach to generate measurable, lasting results.

Contact me to find out how to optimize your email strategy and multiply your conversions within the very first weeks.