6 steps to identify the gaps in your email strategy
When you’ve gotten into a routine with your email marketing, often it’s difficult to identify any gaps in your strategy. That’s why we put together this quick, step-by-step guide to evaluate what might be missing and where you can improve your efforts.
Let's get started.
Step 1: Your audience
List growth is the heartbeat of email marketing. Lists churn 20-30% per year on average, so it’s absolutely crucial that you keep yours growing with the right type of subscribers.
Checklist:
✅ Are you offering simple, relatively frictionless signup opportunities at all of your customer touchpoints?
✅ Do your forms provide new subscribers a valuable incentive (e.g. a discount, exclusive content, a sweepstakes entry) for signing up?
✅ Are you setting clear expectations for what will happen once someone signs up?
✅ Are you asking for only the information you actually need and plan to use right away?
No value proposition + unengaging CTA = what NOT to do with your email signup form.
Step 2: Email design
Your emails should be stylish, easy to read and engage with on all devices, and consistent with the rest of your branding.
Checklist:
✅ Are you incorporating plenty of white space?
✅ Is your email design optimized for mobile?
✅ Is your text large enough to read on a small screen?
✅ Are you using a CTA button for your main call to action?
✅ Are you being mindful of your use of color?
✅ Have you optimized for people viewing with images turned off?
Step 3: Optimized content
Email isn't a landing page or a tweet. Make sure you're optimizing your content specifically for the inbox and your audience's expectations for the channel.
Checklist:
✅ Diversification: Do you mix things up with both different types of content and different mediums of content (blog posts, landing pages, videos, etc.)?
✅ Optimized Copy: Are you focusing as much on your subject lines, preheader text, headlines, and CTA copy as much your body copy?
✅ Relevant Content: The days of batch-and-blast are long over. Are you sending the same content to everyone on your list, or personalizing it to their individual interests?
Step 4: Smart segmentation
List segmentation helps you guarantee you’re sending the right messaging to the right folks, and small tweaks to your email content for each of your segments can make a huge difference.
The Escape Game segments their audience by location to offer a more personalized experience.
Checklist:
✅ First of all, ARE you segmenting your audience?
✅ Are you segmenting by demographics, like age and location?
✅ Are you segmenting by behavior, like purchase history or step in the customer lifecycle?
Step 5: Automation
Why automate? Well, it helps you save time, repurpose content, and deliver the right message at exactly the right time.
Checklist:
✅ Are you automating a welcome email or series for new subscribers?
✅ Are you automating based on important dates, like birthday or signup anniversary?
✅ Are you automating based on field changes?
✅ Are you automating based on link clicks?
Step 6: Testing
It’s easy to make assumptions about what you THINK your audience wants, but the only way to truly know their preferences over time is through continual testing!
An example of a subject line test from one of our own emails! (The emoji won.)
Checklist:
✅ Are you testing subject lines?
• Personalization
• Emojis
• Phrasing/Word Order
✅ Are you testing your from name?
✅ Are you testing send times?
✅ Are you testing your email content?
• CTA color, shape, placement, and copy
• Types and placement of content
• Visuals
If you're able to check off all these boxes, first off: Kudos to you! Your email strategy is in an excellent place.
If not, no worries – very few brands can say they've fully optimized EVERY element of their email marketing program. If you need a little help filling in the gaps, feel free to reach out to our Services Team for a consultation. They can provide some suggestions and even implement them for you!
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