Create Your Email Marketing Strategy in 6 Minutes

Pete Davis

CEO, Ampjar

24 Sep, 2017

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You’ve nailed how to send the perfect email campaign, now we want to help you consider the context of your email marketing strategy. Bare with us, this is good stuff! And in true Ampjar style won’t take long 😉

With your Instagram content, you work hard to ensure that your individual posts are great and that they fit into a wider context and story. Email marketing is the same – you need to build great campaigns but they also need to fit into the broader story of what your customers get when they open an email from you.

Your email database should be something you place a lot of value on. They’re your customers, and/or are people who have opted-in to hear from you and that’s a big deal! They’re (hopefully) a pretty significant source of revenue for you. Your list also should include people who are advocates for your brand and recommend your products/ services to their friends and others online.

The good news is that you probably already have a strategy. Most likely, you won’t have it written down, but you actually know most of it already.

This post intends to help you consider this, and in less than 6 minutes to give you more confidence in your approach.

There are five areas to think over. For each one, we’re going to pose questions for you, and you’ll probably quite easily have the answers 😉

Send frequency

How often do you want to send emails to your customers?

• Weekly
• Fortnightly
• Monthly
• Multiple times a week
• No set frequency

Send time

And when will your customers get your emails?

• A set time on a set day
• No set time or day

One of the challenges here is that if you want to build some expectation and habit, it’s much harder to do this when you’re not sending emails all that often.

If I get your emails every Thursday night at 8pm then after a couple of weeks I understand that and learn to expect them. If they come every other Thursday it’ll take me a lot longer to spot that pattern and to start looking out for your emails.

P.S. we have much more on send times here. Read here

Subject line

Your subject line is the front page of your email. Read our blog post to understand more about your options.

What do you want your customers to see from you here?

• Ampjar’s default subject line; so that my customers broadly know what they’re getting when they open the email
• Picking something interesting out from the email
• A few pieces from the email in a short subject line
• Whatever I feel like doing on the day

There’s no wrong answer, just know what you want to do, and own it!

The Words (language)

Whether you’re a big or small brand, customers want to trust you, and part of this is them consistently understanding what they get from you on any channel. How you talk to them is fundamental to this.

Language is a big part of a brand’s personality and an important part of differentiating between brands in a market. Consider a discount drug store who ‘gets you the best deal’ vs another provider who places more value on service and the experience. Their websites, social content, radio ads, and billboards are all consistent in tone-of-voice and are usually completely different from their competitors.

Just think, if you had a friend who spoke really differently to you on a phone call one day. It’s immediately unfamiliar and you’d pick them up on it and ask them what’s wrong.

There are a few different parts to this, and most are less about ticking a box and more about summing up your approach.

• What is the tone of voice that you use? Are you conversational or drive customers with punchier sentences?
• How much copy do you write, as much as spacing will allow or just enough to get the point across?
• Do you talk in the singular, “I” or as the company “We”?
• Do you use emojis?
• Do you use CAPITAL LETTERS, and bolding to get your point across?!

Content

Articulating what your customers get when they open your emails may now be obvious if you’re using Ampjar. They get a collection of the best content from Instagram across the past week or two.

• What does this content look like though?
• What is the balance here; are you exclusively linking them to 8 products to buy now?
• Do you bring other pieces of content in?
• Do you lead with posts that talk about sales and direct customers to buy?
• Would you ask your customers to vote for you in an award that you were nominated for or leave you a review to help you out?
• Do you announce new product drops or exclusive sales through your campaigns?
• Do you talk about other brands or just what you’re doing?

The good news is that you might not really need to answer this section as much as the others! This is an area that you can feel out over time.

It is worth considering however what you’ve included in recent campaigns. Take this opportunity to jump onto your campaign page and look back at your past campaigns.

What do you ask them to do? What would you ask them to do?

Do you think any of this would change if you had some pressure to generate some more sales? It is certainly worth thinking about, especially in the context of your approach to words and language.

…so send frequency + send time + subject line + words + content = your basic email marketing strategy.

If you’re game, write down your answers and set a date in your calendar to look back in 3 months, read what you wrote down and consider whether you want to change anything.

This is also a great time to commit to the strategy, so if you want to lock in weekly campaigns but have struggled in the past, or want to be more personable in what you say in your emails, now’s the time to commit!

As ever I’d love to hear your thoughts and am here to help in any way that I can.

– Pete