Crafting an email strategy can be a tall order. However, with the right approach and a bit of creativity, you can create an email strategy that is both engaging & effective. Here are a few tips to help you get started.

First, pick a service platform. There are so many to choose from. I highly recommend Mailchimp. Designing in Mailchimp is a breeze with its drag-and-drop template builder, so anyone can use it with a little training. Mailchimp has excellent analytics reporting. The reports show open rates from one campaign to another as well as which areas of each design are performing the highest. This enables you to track whether or not a campaign is successful but also gives insight into what is most attractive to your customers.

Once you pick your platform, think about your audience. How will this email campaign benefit them? What are you trying to say to pull them more into your brand, product, or service? It is important to start and not judge yourself (or your designers) too harshly. Email marketing is a long game. Begin with no perfection in mind! Send an email once a week with some creative ideas and some deals and see what is resonating with your customers. Pay attention to what they pay attention to! This is why I advocate for Mailchimp and their analytics tools. You will soon learn (3-6 months) what is working best.

Once you have been running email sends or campaigns for 3-6 months then you can re-examine what is great and what is not so great. Most likely you are doing a couple of different things such as trying to sell a product or service, building brand awareness, and regularly driving traffic to your website. Judge the performance of email sends based on the goal. For example, if you send text heavy newsletter style emails you might have a high open rate (which is good) but a low click through rate (which might be bad if you want people to continue reading the full article). You might want to adjust your text to be teaser text so you engage people to click through and read the rest of the article. If you are selling something and have a high open rate, high-click through rate but your sales are down…eh…then technically the email was a success but one could argue that perhaps the product’s price was a deal breaker for the customer.

Once you have your platform, test your email and gain of sense of what your customers are responding to then you can build a powerful strategy that serves both your business and your customers. Just know that it will take some time, a consistent schedule and internal conversations to implement but the result will be well worth it.