Creating a good strategy

- As with any type of marketing the key to achieving success is all in your strategic planning. Let's go over how you can create a powerful email marketing strategy for your business. First and foremost, focus on list growth. Without people on your list there is no email strategy. Some ways you can actively build your list is having an easy and accessible way for people to become a part of it. Your website will be a key component. Make sure you have a signup form somewhere obvious on your homepage. Make it really easy for people to stay in touch. Next make sure you have all the permission levels in place. You only want people who have expressly given you permission on your list. You can do this by having a double opt-in setup or even just by making it really easy for people to unsubscribe from your emails with an obvious option at the bottom. Once people have happily subscribed to your list get whitelisted. Whitelisting is when you have people add you to their trusted contact list with their email provider. Getting whilelisted helps you avoid spam filters and if people have the promotion tab setup in Gmail this helps you show up in their main inbox. Now that your list is growing make sure that you're segmenting your list as you grow. It will be a lot easier segmenting in the beginning then having to go back and do it. This means that you're grouping people according to specific variables that you've decided on. Part of your strategy will be deciding how you will segment your subscribers. one segmentation is in play, this will allow you to get personal. Personalization is the goal in any email marketing campaign. How can you personalize the content and emails that you send out to your list? Using your knowledge of purchases, location, and interests you can individualize your emails to create a greater impact. Similar to segmentation, automation is best set up early in your email strategy. Automation allows you to scale your email marketing efforts and will help you focus more time on the important things and takes out of the manual work that eats up all your time. If you had the campaigns in your Mail Chimp dashboard, and select Create Campaign, it's here under Create an Email that you have an option to set up an automated email. So Mail Chimp will walk you through, they have a couple different options, including subscriber activity, so you're able to setup an automated flow to respond when a subscriber updates. If you have a store integrated it's here that you can have some really robust automation, as well as anything date based, so say you have a specific date and you need to send out an appointment. And then, you have some addition advance functionality working with the API. An example of automation is a post-purchase email sequence, think Amazon. After you purchase a product you receive a confirmation order that your order has been received, then you receive an email letting you know when it has been shipped and then another email notifying you that your product has been delivered. Amazon has the entire product lifecycle automated. Once an order is made the email automation sequence is kicked off. Lastly, without actual emails being sent out all the strategy is lost. Build a content calendar to help you determine what emails to create, what to include in them, when to send, and whom to send to. I have an example of a content calendar that you can use in your own strategy, and you'll find it in the file section. You can see it here on the screen. Right now you can see that Hansel and Petal has an email that they send out every Friday to their Flower Tips subscribers. So they have this mapped out and they know that they're always going to send out this email every Friday at 10:00 AM. They also know that Mother's Day is coming up, so they're starting to build out their strategy knowing that a Mother's Day countdown is going to be really great since they are a flower shop. Now that you understand the components of a strong email strategy begin developing yours by taking steps to grow your email list.