How To DIY Your Email Marketing: 5 Expert Tips

Developing a strategy is step one when starting your DIY email marketing journey.

Most courses, blogs, and other educational materials you find will tell you about creating a campaign calendar; and some good ones will probably advise you to segment your lists and set up automations.

All of these play a fundamental role in your strategy. But, if you want a meaningful ROI with email, and you don’t want to waste time, you have to communicate with your team to flesh out all the nitty-gritty before sending emails you think might “do well” just because you saw a competitor send something similar.

While you’re in that strategy meeting with your team, don’t just focus on nailing the basics. Take one step further in the right direction by integrating these 5 tips that will bring your email marketing strategy to the next level! 

1. Map out the whole customer journey

Seeing an overview of your customer journey will give you an idea about what emails will make sense to your subscribers depending on the actions they’ve already taken.

This will help you set up automations with the right triggers and messaging to send relevant emails to the right people. 

Although general templates supplied by your email provider can serve as a helpful starting guide, they won’t help you connect most efficiently with your target audience. More specific and catered emails can help you enhance your automations to connect more effectively with your subscribers throughout every step of their journey. This can help foster a more personal relationship with potential customers so when they're ready to make a purchase, you'll be their top choice!

Start by asking yourself these questions about your customer’s journey when building automations:

• Is this their first purchase? 

• Are they subscribed via a subscription service? 

• Is there a cross-selling opportunity? 

• Are they only interested in certain categories?

2. Identify and stay on top of your key metrics

You won’t know your email marketing strategy is working unless you set goals or benchmarks. These should be clear enough that everyone on your team understands what you want to accomplish with email marketing.

For starters, you can focus on tracking the following:

• Deliverability and bounce rate - this shows you how many of your emails are successfully reaching peoples’ inboxes. 

• Click-through rate - this is the percentage of people that clicked on buttons or links within your email after opening.

• Conversion rate - the percentage of recipients that completed a desired action (purchased, watched, shared, etc.)

• List growth - monitor how your list grows and changes over time. 

• Open rate - this is the percentage of subscribers that opened your email.

• Unsubscribe rate - the percentage of subscribers leaving your list.

• Overall ROI - helps you determine how successful your email marketing efforts are at generating revenue in comparison to their cost.

Regularly review your results and compare them with your industry’s benchmarks to know if you need to regroup and optimize your strategy or scale.

3. Conduct A/B tests

Although there are best practices, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy. What may work for others may not work for your business, even when you’re in the same industry.

It is important to test different variables within your strategy to find the sweet spot for your subscribers. If you have an idea or find something interesting that you think might bring you success, test it out and see what the data comes back with.

Your A/B tests shouldn’t be restricted to just design and copy. Try testing the sender name, send time, landing pages, promos, and even the number of emails in an automation. 

Continue testing and remember to set the winner criteria. Determine what factors will be the most valuable when deciding which is the winning test.

4. Look beyond email aesthetics

On-brand, well-designed emails contribute to brand recognition and help establish real estate in your audience’s minds. 

But obsessing about making your emails design-focused can be counterproductive. Eye candy designs can be image-heavy which may affect deliverability, email clipping, and may even raise spam flags.

Include in your strategy (and tests) text-only emails and find a balance between text and images. After that, you can create an easily customizable master template with all the necessary blocks and variables.

Don’t forget to update your master template whenever you test variables to ensure the winners are rolled out when sending future emails.

5. Integrate SMS

According to a survey by Klaviyo, 40% of shoppers prefer to receive communication from a brand once a week, while 30% prefer to hear from the brand a few times a week.

In fact, promotional text messages have an average click-through rate of 36%, which is 8x higher than the average click-through rate of email (4.5%).

Given those stats, integrating SMS into your overall marketing strategy is a no-brainer. And the best part is, SMS works especially well in tandem with email marketing.

Many email service providers provide SMS marketing features that allow you to strategically map out when it is best to send an email or a text. You can send a text to supplement an email or vice versa!

Conclusion

DIY-ing your email marketing strategy requires continuous learning, extensive planning, and rigorous optimization. 

You need to be hands-on and stay on top of all the moving parts to make informed decisions about maximizing your email marketing efforts for better ROI.

This immersion is great, but it also demands a significant portion of your time and attention, which may be needed in other areas of your business to sustain its momentum.

If you’re facing challenges with strategy or are thinking about outsourcing your email marketing, we’re here to help! Count on our expert team for solutions that deliver results.

Book a free strategy call here.