Email marketing can be very rewarding, but doing it effectively requires a strategic approach. A strategic approach to your email marketing campaigns has the potential of substantially increasing your ROI.

Creating an email marketing strategy can seem like an overwhelming task. Asking yourself these 3 questions will help you get started and set you on the right path.

Who are you sending these emails to and how will you segment them?
You are sending these emails to people that know who you are and care enough about what you have to offer that they subscribed to your email list. In order to know who they are, you need to know their demographics and psychographics. We need to know their demographics, but it is even more important to know their psychographics. Psychographics are what they value, what they long for in life, etc. Once you know this information you can group people together using buyer personas. According to HubSpot, buyer personas are “semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on data and research.” Doing this will allow you to send more personalized and relevant emails to your subscribers and will help you write content that draws them into the message.

Why does my company need to have an email marketing campaign and what is the goal?
Does your company want to increase sales? Increase engagement? Develop relationships? These reasons and many others are great, but you need to create goals in order to measure your success. Are you going to measure click through rate, deliverability, open rate, increase in sales, or conversion rates? Choosing something to measure will help you optimize the emails that you are sending. You will be able to learn what works and what does not work for your email marketing campaigns.

What type of content will keep my customers engaged with the emails?
Customer engagement is very important to an email marketing campaign. Each organization will have a different answer to this question. Do your customers want to learn more about actionable marketing tips? Do they want to learn how to live a healthy lifestyle? Or do they want to see the new clothes that your company is selling? Whatever it is that your customers want from you is something that you should be leveraging in your emails.

Creating an email marketing strategy is something that every business should do. Don’t waste your company’s time and money by blindly sending mass emails to all of your customers. Answering these questions should set your company on the right track to creating a great email marketing campaign.