How to Design an Email Marketing Program

Most brands concentrate their email marketing efforts on promotional emails and discounts. Subscribers expect the same rusty messages How to Design an  in their inboxes. This leads to the dismissal of emails—subscribers ignore, delete, unsubscribe, or worse—report emails as spam. As a result, companies miss powerful, direct connections to customers. A customer should want to read a brand’s email, not just search through their inbox trash folder for deals at checkout.

Making memorable emails is hard. Getting creative can be challenging, and it can be tough to sell and manage a unique email marketing program. But wouldn’t it be nice to deliver a “must read” to a customer’s inbox.

Before generating and trying new ideas make sure to have business goals

Branding guidelines, and customer research in place. These three key components help ensure a brand’s mission, goals, look, voice, and community are at the program’s forefront.

Goals: always tie everything back to your brand’s greater goals. This will help you focus on what types of emails and messages should be considered and help pinpoint where your brand may be missing opportunities.

Branding guidelines: let’s be honest: being creative with a brand can be downright intimidating. However, most companies do have call lists branding guidelines for both design and voice. These guides cover important aspects of a brand, including appropriate How to Design an  colors, look, feel, and word choices. They assist in making sure branded terms are spelled correctly and logos aren’t abused. Some guides are long and in-depth, while others are only one page. Branding guidelines should be flexible, living documents, but they serve as a lifeline while in the deep end of creativity. Check out some great branding guidelines, shared online, from uc berkeley, mozilla, american heart association, blackberry, and mailchimp.

Customer research know what your brand’s customers are looking

What they may also enjoy. While there are many ways to go about audience research, most brands already have a lot of data at their fingertips. For e-commerce sites, a brand knows what customers are purchasing, where they live, and more. With basic website analytics, it’s easy to gauge popular content. This type of data is a goldmine. For example, a b2c outdoor clothing brand may find customers make extremely high-dollar purchases on safari clothing in the first quarter of the year. They can then make sure emails highlight this type of clothing as well as feature safari tips.

If you don’t have enough data, surveying JA Phone Number your audience is easy. Tools such as wufoo, polldaddy, surveymonkey, and even google document’s forms are simple to use. And for the company looking to level up, try qualtrics, qualaroo, or foresee. To How to Design an  further drive customer research, a brand can develop personas and use them to classify audiences, break down psychographic variables, and then build email marketing around them.

With key components and knowledge in place, it’s time to decide types of emails and creativity. At this point, lay out every single email already sent by your brand in order to decide what to revamp, where there may be gaps, what’s outdated, etc. Depending on how many emails your brand sends, it may be important to focus on one type of email at a time.

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