Key elements of email marketing: When beginning email marketing understanding the individual elements of what makes up an email strategy is really important. Let’s go over these key elements.
The first element to know and to understand is your target. This is the person that you wish to directly market to with your email campaign. In order for this person to begin receiving your emails they will need to become a subscriber. And a subscriber is just that. It is someone who has opted in to receive your email communications.
This can be through a web form on your website, manually from a trade show signup list, or perhaps they’ve bought a product from you in the past. All of these subscribers form what’s known as your list. Your list will be stored and kept in your email marketing service.
Another key element with email marketing is segmentation. This simply means that you’re able to categorize different subscribers into different lists, groups, or subgroups.
For example, you might segment your list by creating a group of just customers. You might also segment by location, products they purchased, or even have a group of prospects that have not yet bought anything.
In MailChimp we can create a new segment based off of those qualifications. An email service provider who does a great job of segmentation is Klaviyo. If you integrate Shopify they’ll automatically segment your list into customers who’ve purchased in the last 30 days as well as those who have bought over $100.
Another critical element is your open rate. You will find that on your analytics dashboard. This will be one of the main metrics you look at when determining the success of your email campaigns. Simply put, your open rate is how many people opened your email. You will also be able to look at the click-through rate. That’s how many people clicked on the link that you included in your email. In this example the clicked number is zero because this is a fictitious brand. But this is where you will see the number of times people have clicked on your links in your email.
One thing to note when talking about email campaigns is that they can be only one email or can have multiple emails that make up one campaign. When we talk about email campaigns with multiple emails they’re often labeled as a flow or an automation email series. A good example of this is a welcome flow.
Many businesses have these in place so that after a person subscribes to the list they’re automatically entered into a welcome email series or flow they have pre set up.
In this example here you can see that MailChimp has a welcome new subscribers automation flow. It would be something like this.
Email number one would say something like thanks for joining.
Email number two would be more of a general followup with a subject like commonly asked questions.
And email number three, this could be the final email before you enter them into your general newsletter mailings and I might ask if they have any questions.
As you begin to set up your own email campaigns, you’ll see that getting started can be easy. Go through each element discussed as you set up your own email campaign, and begin testing the various elements to see which works best with your intended audience.
