I have a conflicting relationship with the word strategy.
On the surface, it’s a pretty straightforward word with a simple meaning:
“a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim”
But when it’s used in marketing, it gives me the ick like a family friend who insists you call him “Uncle”.
The problem is that marketing bros have misused the word for so long that as soon as I hear or read it, I assume the next sentence is “LIKE AND COMMENT FOR YOUR FREE EBOOK”.
Despite these wanky undertones, strategy is still an important part of email marketing, so it’s useful to have a clear idea of what it is.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Before we get to what it is, there’s something else we need to talk about…
What email strategy isn’t
Despite what books, videos, courses, blogs, etc. might promise, an email strategy isn’t something you can just copy and paste into your business.
(Well, you can, but you shouldn’t be surprised when it doesn’t work)
Remember keyword-stuffing? It was a popular “strategy” to boost your SEO rankings by cramming your website so full of keywords that every page reads like a coded message.
“But keyword stuffing worked!”
Did it though?
Maybe at first, but quickly everyone was doing the same thing, cancelling each other out. Google even added keyword stuffing to their spamming policy, and actively deprioritised sites that did it.
Copying what everyone else is doing isn’t a strategy. It’s following the Pied Piper into the river.
Your strategy should be bespoke to your business
Your business is unique, and this should be reflected in your email strategy.
To do this you need to understand the characteristics of your product/service as well as the motivations of your audience.
Only when you have a clear picture of these two things can you start to construct an email strategy that works for you.
Think of your marketing emails like movie trailers. You’ve already made the movie (your product or service), but now you need to make a trailer that represents the movie accurately, and appeals to your target audience.
If you don’t understand the movie well enough, the trailer isn’t going to be a good representation, and could potentially mislead people.
And if you don’t understand the audience, the trailer won’t connect with the right people, and no one will buy a ticket.
What makes up an email strategy?
Audience
Before you even consider what you’re going to send, you need to know who you’re sending it to.
This is more than just emailing everyone on your list. After all, not everyone on your list will be your ideal customer.
Maybe this is a welcome sequence, where you’re reaching out to people who signed up for a free trial.
Or perhaps you’re trying to win back lapsed customers who once had a membership or free trial, but logged out one day and never came back.
Whatever your campaign is, the audience is different. And it’s always a subset of your ICP (ideal customer profile). You just need to decide which subset it is you’re talking to.
Message
Similarly, your message will change depending on the reason you’re emailing someone.
For example, if they’ve been active users for two years, your message shouldn’t highlight features they already know about. Instead, you need to create a message that addresses their doubts and the reasons they left.
Your message is the narrative that threads throug the entire campaign. It could be “Sign in to use all these awesome features”, or even “We’ve got something great coming up you’ll really love”.
The point is that without a message, you don’t have a strategy. That’s because the message is the thing that binds every email together, even if it’s subtle.
Tone of voice
You’ve got the who and the what, but now you need the how. As in how are you going to communicate this message?
Most companies answer this in the same way—by talking in a generic semi-formal business tone.
You know the tone. It’s the same tone people use in job interviews. It’s an uncomfortable professionalism, with attempts at personality and humour shoe-horned in.
“We expect everyone to work hard for the company, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have fun. Jeremy once brought in a life-size cutout of Jeff Goldblum, which was hilarious”
Your tone of voice should give an authentic representation of your brand and your company. And it should resonate with your audience.
If your company is a small startup with a youthful team, your tone will be different from a Fortune 500 company with thousands of employees and a CEO being investigated for sexual harassment.
Similarly, if your demographic is 60-year-old accountants, you’ll want to talk to them differently from how you would talk to 20-year-old baristas.
Actions
What do you actually want the readers to do?
“Give us their money” is probably the high-level action, but there will be a bunch of smaller actions before that.
For example, if you’re trying to convert someone from a free trial to paid, you want them to do a number of things:
- Sign in to your app
- Use the different key features
- Log on several days in a row
- Understand the value of your product
These micro-conversions are all things that will have a huge impact on whether or not they pay up after 14 days.
These actions go hand in hand with your message, as the message will guide them towards these actions.
Content
This one is a bit more obvious, but your emails need to have content.
Luckily, this content is much easier to create once you know your audience, tone of voice, message, and actions. This is especially important if you’re then going to outsource the content writing.
- Your audience informs who you’re addressing
- Your tone of voice informs the style of writing
- Your message informs the themes of the content
- Your actions inform the CTA’s along the way
You already know what beats you need to hit, so the content is about hitting these beats in a way that resonates with your audience.
This is where a good writer will have a lot of fun. They can be creative and playful, and try to genuinely entertain the reader.
Testing
Sure, you could just do everything above, and probably send some decent marketing emails. But you can refine your strategy and improve your emails if you test them too.
Usually, this would be in the form of A/B testing, where you test two variants to see which is more effective.
Disclaimer: The bigger your audience, the more credence you should give your test results. If you’re only emailing 100 people, you probably won’t learn very much
Sometimes this is just the subject line, but sometimes you’ll want to test whole emails to see how they play.
Try not to get too hung up on testing, though. It can be a huge time sink, and that time would probably be better utilised working on the next campaign. It’s best for those things you’re unsure of, and want to get a bit of clarity.
There is no rulebook
These are all things you should consider, but by no means should you consider this gospel.
In fact, anyone who promises to know the formula for the perfect email strategy is almost definitely a snake oil salesman…or an author.
Don’t waste your time with templates and frameworks, just focus on creating an email strategy that feels authentic to your business.
Play around, be creative, and try to have fun.
The more you enjoy creating and sending your emails, the more your audience will enjoy reading them.
