Is your email marketing plan effective, or are you sending out email after email with no real goals?

Email marketing can be confusing, difficult, and time-consuming. Putting a strategy into place simplifies the process and helps you make more effective decisions.

Your email marketing campaigns are most effective when you customize them to your leads, but the general methods for creating a plan work across the board.

Keep reading to learn how to develop your email marketing plan.

Choose Your Email Marketing Plan Goals

Defining your goals for each email marketing campaign helps you tailor what you send. Look at your current email marketing efforts.

Do they still align with your overall company goals, or do they need to be tweaked?

Goal examples include increasing your email subscriber list, increasing response rates, and converting leads into customers.

Associate a measurable metric to each goal, so you can tell if you’re meeting them.

Use the Right Tools

You need reliable email marketing software to ensure your messages reach your prospects. You also want software with robust tools to customize the messages you send.

Being able to use the software easily is another consideration. You want something you can understand right away, so you don’t waste time figuring out the features.

Check out this comparison for Sendinblue vs Mailchimp for an idea of the feature differences.

If your current software doesn’t work well for you, explore other options to simplify the technical aspect of email marketing. I recommend you to use EngageBay’s marketing automation software, which is an affordable and all-in-one marketing, sales and service platform.

Understand the Rules

Ensure your email marketing campaign follows all requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act.

You’ll need to study the act to ensure compliance with all details, but some of the key requirements include:

• Clear header information to identify yourself
• Physical address in every email
• Identified as an ad
• Clear subject lines
• Easy opt-out options
• Prompt removals after opting out

Every email sent that doesn’t meet the requirements can cost you a penalty of up to $43,280. It’s an expensive mistake to ignore the act.

Develop Valuable Content

The content you send needs to offer value to recipients. If you’re sending emails that aren’t relevant or offer no real information, your prospects will delete them.

Keep your goals in mind when creating content. Send a mix of educational and promotional emails to keep prospects interested.

Customizing the content to match the needs of different recipients increases the effectiveness of your email marketing. Using A/B split tests can help you figure out which email messages work well for different segments of your lead database.

Use Analytics

Email marketing offers ample analytics to evaluate your efforts. You can check open rates and see which customers take actions based on the emails.

Use the analytics to assess if your emails are helping you achieve your goals. Continue testing new tactics, using the analytics as a guide.

Improve Your Email Marketing

When you have a solid email marketing plan, you use your time and marketing efforts more effectively. That effort can increase your lead conversions and sales to help your business grow.

Head over to our marketing archives for more strategies to grow your company.