Email Marketing Strategy: A framework for Success

In-depth guideline on about email marketing to get ready for 2021

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An Idea (by Ingenious Piece)

22 min readJan 16, 2021

When it comes to email marketing, I have a massive experience in email communication for years. I believe it’s a great way to connect with all of your readers at scale, yet create intimate conversations with each of them. Once you know how to get people onto your list, it’s time to start talking to them. A lot of people are wary about making their emails stand out from the crowd.

There was approximately 4.04 billion email users in 2020. For comparison, there were 3.9 billion users in 2019. There are a lot of alternative means of communication today, but email is still the most popular.

The following statistics on how many emails are sent per day in 2020 tell us. Let’s get started.

When it comes to marketing, email is king. It’s the best tool to drive engagement and build relationships. Email campaigns deliver a higher ROI than every other type of marketing category. Set up your emails properly, and it can be extremely lucrative. Today, email marketing continues to be a critical strategy for marketing (and sales teams) across an array of industries and business types. As a result, at growing companies, an email marketing service provider (ESP) is one of the first additions to a marketer’s tool belt — and for good reason.

Email marketing remains a quick and effective way to engage and nurture leads into loyal customers. It’s also extremely cost-effective — some studies show an ROI of up to 4,400%!

It takes an average of seven interactions to get people to interact with your content. This is known as The Marketing Rule of Seven, which was invented in the 1930s but is still used today.

In order to create a plan, you’ll need to get clear on the following:

What will your emails look like?
How often will you send emails?
Identify goals and success metrics

But before that, let’s know about some basic informations about email marketing.

Why to choose email?

58% of consumers check their email first thing in the morning vs. 11% Facebook and 2% Twitter (source).
91% of consumers use email at least daily vs. 57% Facebook and 14% Twitter (source).
Staggering stat: 77% prefer email as the place for permission-based promotional messages (i.e., they want to know about your products and sales) vs. 4% Facebook and 1% Twitter (source).
For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $38. Put that ROI in your pipe and smoke it (source).

Do I need to say more?

Ask Yourself Few Questions

What lists do you subscribe to?
What made you subscribe? What was the offer that you couldn’t resist?
What do you like about the newsletters? Think about the format, design, frequency, tone, exclusive or special offers.
How do you feel when you get your favorite newsletter (s)?
What makes you unsubscribe from a newsletter?

Print out all the emails or pull them all up on your screen. What are the commonalities? Do you love emails that have a beautiful design or do you care about them being short, sweet, and ending with a coupon? What made you unsubscribe? Were you flooded on the daily with emails that didn’t give you value? I invite you to think about what connects you to and repels you from, a brand.

Now, do this exercise with your competitors. What are they doing right? What are they missing? How can you be a little different from the pack? This is not about following the herd, this is about you seeing what’s out there and carving out space for yourself. In marketing speak, we call this a “blue ocean” strategy.

Stand out. Grab your customer’s attention and make a real connection.

Remember, your newsletter is NOT THE LIFE STORY OF YOU. Deliver what your customer wants. We’ll talk about creating your customer profile soon, but think about what annoys or frustrates them. How their lives could be made easier or their day a little lighter? Because people are selfish. Inboxes are Darwinian. Every email is met with: why should I give this my attention and why should I care?

Start with the research, first. Then we’ll get into your customer and how this all impacts your business.

Start by Doing Your Research

Before you start designing those emails, do your research. Immerse yourself in the land of the newsletter to see what makes you and, more importantly, your customer tick.

For a minute, forget that you’re a business owner. Right now, you’re a customer. Be the demanding you that has a rage blackout when Amazon didn’t deliver your package on time, and you want to tell customer service precisely what you think.

You probably subscribe to hundreds of newsletters, and you don’t even know it.

Ever use Unroll.Me? It’s a rude awakening and a reminder of all your greatest impulse hits. That coffee you paid for using your credit card? Suddenly, you’re getting coupons for French Roast. That deal you wanted on shipping? Now you’re getting weekly sales alerts that sometimes send you into a mild panic.

You get a lot of mail.

And here’s the thing: so does your customer. It’s not enough that you have a fantastic product. Although you’d like to believe that what you’re pitching is the BEST product or service ever, your customers feel otherwise. Trust me on this. They have a lot of choices in the world. Now, you have to straddle showing up with a terrific product/service, but you also have to make them feel AWESOME while doing it. Your customer has to feel like you’re making their lives easier or you’re making them feel special, entertained, or educated. In marketing, we call this “emotional benefits.”

So let’s see how you can rise above the tsunami that is the inbox. In the name of cash in your bank account, I invite you to do a little market research.

How should your emails look?

First things first, get the subject line right.

Just like an article needs a good headline, your email needs a compelling subject line that gets people to click and open.

Treat your subject line like a movie trailer. In other words, give a preview of your email so your subscribers know what to expect.

Without an appealing headline, people will overlook your email or mistaken it for spam. The most effective headlines should capture your immediate attention.

The best email writers tend to ask questions that trigger a particular emotion, such as curiosity, connection, or the feeling of missing out. (Pro tip: Keep an eye out for potential spam words.)

You use the main content of your email to build traffic, engagement, or trust. Depending on the calls to action for your email, you may want to:

create brand awareness;
spark engagement; or
convert your audience into customers (if you are trying to sell a book, for example).

As a writer, you’re looking to drive people to your content and increase traffic, which also increases trust and authority.

Overall, you want to be clear about the goal of your email. Know what you want your reader to do as a result of reading the email, and make sure it’s clear to them as well.

Investing in Email Has its Benefits

Drives a higher return on investment: A McKinsey study found that companies who put data-driven personalization at the center of marketing and sales decisions improve marketing ROI by 15% — 20%+.
Increases the likelihood that people will buy from you: Nearly nine in ten consumers say that personalization has some impact on their purchasing decisions (“The Personalization Payoff,” Adobe 2016).
Users feel empowered, appreciated, and understood. The results? Your unsubscribe rates plummet: More than 60% of consumers feel more positively about a brand when the promotional outreach and marketing messages they receive are personalized (“The Personalization Payoff,” Adobe, 2016).

By now, I hope you’re looking at your subscriber list and thinking: HELLO. WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE?

How to track your results

Yup, I am asking you to get saucy with your metrics. These are the top metrics you should be tracking:

Open Rate: the number/percentage of people on your list who opened the email
Click-Through Rate: the number/percentage who clicked through a link in the email or took the specific CTA you wanted them to take
Unsubscribes: the number of people who unsubscribed following the sending of your email (Don’t panic — this is a good thing because you want an engaged list)

Once you have clarity about your reports — and considering the context of your specific business — you can make smart and informed decisions about the next steps.

Once you understand the metrics, it’s time to track them.

Let’s say you want to improve a metric that’s been the same for a long time. Using your reports, you can make an informed guess about what you could change to improve. Then, try making the change and tracking your results as a kind of experiment:

Come up with a hypothesis about what will happen when you make a change.
Test your idea.
Use your reports to determine whether the change you made works.
If it does, then replicating that action. If not, test another element until you’ve determined what works.

Pro tip: assess your email marketing results and performance each month, and use the example above to test and reassess your work.

Choose an Email Service Provider

AWeber: Easy-to-use, you can Create and send modern, professional email newsletters to your audience with powerful email marketing and automation tools. This is a paid service with a 30-day free trial.
MailChimp: One of my favorites because they have incredible how-to-use templates for every scenario. Free for businesses that have under 2K subscribers and packages start at $10/month. Great segmentation, automation, and integration tools. MC also integrates easily with many e-commerce and cloud/web platforms.
GetResponse: GetResponse is a marketing automation service that’s available in over 20 languages.

Effective strategy to write subject lines that lead to higher email open rates

“Since 2011 email opening rates on mobile devices increased by 34%. Last year, 61% of all emails were read on a mobile device.” And this changes a lot.

It’s a clear trend that more and more people digest their emails via mobile devices every day. With that in mind, we can dramatically improve the readability of our subject lines by adopting it to the new “mobile first” reality.

More than 50% of all emails are opened by Gmail and Apple Mail, it’s a top priority for email marketers to optimize the length of the subject line at least for those devices (41 characters on iPhone and 70 characters for Gmail) and ideally for all gadgets, clients, and operating systems.

So long as the lowest number of characters supported by the top popular gadgets remains at 41 characters, we want to fit our CTA into this number. We can also place top valuable information to the first line of the email copy as it would be seen as additional info to the subject line in a mobile email app.

While the subject line length is probably the most crucial in 2021 here are some more trends to know:

Using Emojis

According to statistics, only about 7% of subject lines incorporate emojis.

So if this tactic fits into your product conception, it’s a great way to stand apart from the masses. Most likely, this is a nice idea to try out approach with A/B testing.

Using personalization fields

Many experts recommend not overusing name personalization in subject lines. There are plenty of other things you can also use to increase interest in your email: for example, the company’s name or any other data you might have. Here are some ideas for you:

Birthdays and anniversaries
Info about interactions with your site or brand
Locations
Information provided via surveys and feedback

Subject line capitalization

This is one of those tricks that’s usually neglected by many email marketers. There are four styles:

Sentence case
Title Case
all lowercase
ALL UPPERCASE

As we can see, zero percent of emails contain an all uppercase subject line. Because it just looks spammy and dramatically decreases email open rates. It’s definitely a red flag for you. At the same time, only 6% of emails use all lowercase capitalization. It might be a nice tactic for you to stand out from the masses. This form of the email tends to have a more casual one-on-one look. Though it’s better to use plain text all across this type of email and send it with personal email automation tools, I guess. Anyway, you can try this tactic for your marketing email campaigns.

Activate clear value

To be opened, every subject line must offer clear value to the reader (for example knowledge, giveaway, limited offer). Do your best to bring your contacts the idea of what they’ll get when opening your email. The best content is that which brings real value; so give something away. Readers love that stuff. Something like a free template, for example.

A/B Test your subject lines

A compelling subject line will inspire people to open your emails. So you need to A/B test all the subject lines. You should consider this to be as important as the email itself.

Effective strategy to write Email copy that works

Be personal in a smart way

Use the same rules as those for the subject line. Don’t use contacts’ names, especially their last names, in your marketing emails when it’s not necessary. People are sensitive to their personal information being used, and their name is one such thing. Moreover, nowadays it feels spammy. Though it might look natural for person-to-person emails, it’s another story where cold emailing is concerned. I will cover this topic in the next articles.

Try to be personal using other general data that you might have:

Birthdays and anniversaries
Info about interactions with your site or brand
Locations
Business specifics
Information provided via surveys and feedback

You might need to separate your audience to smaller segments to use this personalization data smartly. For example, in delivering different content based on segments’ interests.

Let subscribers get to know you.

People are receiving more emails nowadays than ever before. The average person gets more than 70 emails daily. It’s hard to remember all the senders and even harder to recognize all the companies that message them. So you, therefore, shouldn’t presume that a reader knows your person or company by default. Let a reader get to know you. It’s probably a good idea to personalize emails from your end too. Add your photo, get them know your name. Tell stories from your own experiences. Many SMB and global companies use this tactic for marketing emails these days, and it’s well worthwhile.

Keep things short and bring valuable content only.

There are only two types of words — those which enhance your copy and those that must be deleted. Remember that every word counts. People get tired reading long texts about nothing. There’s far too much content around us and we have no time to consume it all. So stop believing that your piece of text is unique, respect the time and attention of your reader and you’ll be rewarded.

Clarify your goal to readers.

It’s a bad idea to make users guess what you want from them until the end of the email copy. Give readers a clear understanding of why you’re emailing them and what value they’ll get once they’ve finished reading your text. Otherwise, they’ll probably just delete or mark your copy as spam. At the same time, don’t be pushy right from the first line. It’s better not to be pushy at all. Learn to speak the language of readers’ value in the right way. Avoid cliche manipulative pitches. Inboxes are already full to the brim with this sh*tty stuff. It’s hardly likely that there’s space for another.

And one more important tip for you: maintain only a single CTA per email. It’s ok to place it in a few places in the email though. If you’ve more to say — create separated emails or even campaigns for different goals.

Align and visualize your ideas.

We love to scan through content. It’s just how we consume information today. And, rarely, when we meet a genuine piece of art, we read it fully from top to the bottom.

In a good email copy, everything is dedicated to a logical structure and the primary goal of the text. Your email should deliver what was promised in its subject line or email header. And don’t forget to keep your paragraphs short.

Tell breathtaking stories.

Stories are a great way to allow readers to dive into the world of your topic experience. It’s the best way to show the idea from your logical and emotional perspective. It also brings readers closer to your persona, extends the trust and authority. And the best thing — you can help readers to imagine themselves using your product.

Also, you can break up boring topics with a funny joke or two and add some emotion into your pitch, that will help readers keep a focus on the context in spite of the distracting world we live in.

Don’t try to cover too much.

Take one or two ideas and stick around it. Remember to keep things short. The average length of the emails is around 450 words or 3 min of reading. And the tendency is moving forward into shortening of emails. More than 50% of marketing emails shorter than 300 words.

Effective email sending frequency and choosing the right time to send emails

Let’s start from the sending frequency. If your emails are not related to valuable (for the reader) daily reports or news, it’s probably not a good idea to email subscribers every day. Don’t bother your subscribers by emailing too often. Likely this will just force them to unsubscribe from your list, or even worse — mark your email as spam. Instead, make your emails long-awaited, eagerly anticipated and wanted. Keep a clear schedule for the reader so that they know what to expect.

Experts recommend maintaining pauses of 3–5 days for event-triggered emails (for example “If email is opened”) and around a week for schedule-based marketing emails. Such a pace will cover almost all marketing goals.

If you run two or more email campaigns for the same audience, try to keep at least 2–3 days between the emails.

Choosing a Day

There are two main tactics that conflict with each other. First is to hit the most popular time when the probability of opening email is the highest. And another one is to keep away from this rush hours and send emails when the inbox is not so much overloaded.

The Intercom article also supports the idea that, for some industries, weekends work better than weekdays: “Plenty of research has been done on how to send times to affect open rates in different industries. As one example, e-commerce emails are opened slightly more than average on weekends.”

The hottest emailing days are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, while Monday and Fridays tend to be avoided due to their being associated with rushing. Emails are more likely to be skipped on the edge of weekdays because readers are overloaded with their daily work routine — skipping low priority tasks is the only way to escape from this madness.

MailChimp researchers also agreed that Tuesday and Thursday are the two most hot days to send marketing emails.

Choosing the right hour

Timing is crucial. Studies show that people are more responsive at a particular time than at others. Here are the same tactics as for choosing the right day — you can select peak times in order to compete for readers’ attention with others, or you can send your newsletter at a much calmer time to be probably the only email delivered within an hour.

As Buffer says, 20.00 to 00.00 is the best time to sent emails. According to this research, there is an undervalued least-used window of time when emails are likely to be viewed during the evening hours. This tactic leads to a 22% open rate according to research.

Here are also some recommendations from WordStream: They discovered that Tuesday and Wednesday mornings (8–10 am) were the worst times to send newsletters — with a less than 5% open rate. At the same time, Thursday mornings between 8 and 9 had the best results — they get over 25% open rates with this time. The same research presents *plenty of activity late in the evening*.

While Tue, Wed and Thu mornings are overhyped by a ton of email marketers who follow the “recommended” day and time rule, it might be a good idea to follow Buffer’s “evening” recommendations or consider other periods. At the end of the day, we all have a different audience with different time habits and lifestyles. Stick with any suggestions that you feel more comfortable with. A/B test different timings to choose the best for you. Don’t forget to track the critical metrics and you will get the best results for your audience.

Effective way to avoid the spam folder

It’s no secret that every email that falls into the spam folder not only means losing the opportunity for this particular contact, but it also represents a severe strike all around against the reputation of your email campaign and email servers (such as Gmail) in general. Once someone hits “This is spam” button — Gmail registers this not just for this user. It will decrease the trust for your account a bit. I don’t believe it’s necessary to say what happens next once you hit critical mass with regards to getting reported more than a fair few times.

Here are the top 5 recommendations on how you can increase your chances of getting into the inbox folder:

Control the metrics of your email campaigns.

Unsubscribing activities are not actually always a bad thing and here’s why: once you lose your passive readers, you will dramatically increase your trust metrics for email servers. Zero bounces, high open rate, and clicks to the links in the email will grow your karma and will almost guarantee delivery into the inbox folder. In this case, make sure it is clear to your readers how to unsubscribe from your list if they want to. Otherwise, you will fall straight into the spam folder and will get the opposite result — massive damage to your karma and a chronic spam label.

It is also a good practice to clean up your email list. Search for all the subscribers that haven’t opened your emails in 3 months and just delete them from the list. There’s no need to fill mailboxes with garbage if nobody’s reading your texts.

Avoid spammy words in the subject line.

According to extensive research done by Yesware, “This applies most to your email subject line. Words like “free,” “money,” “help” and “reminder” all trigger content-based email spam filters. Especially if you’re not added as a contact in your recipient’s email database”

No all caps words and exclamation points!!%).

Don’t SCREAM!! At your readers. Yeah, I know we live in the era of overacting and over-excited behavior. I personally hate it but, fortunately, such behavior makes no difference for those people who talk to adults like they are 7 years old. Anyway, let’s leave all those habits for Snapchat users, there’s no place in marketing emails for this sh*t 😅. It looks really spammy, and they’re treated the same by email providers. Try to use images or emojis if you want to share your excitement with readers instead.

Don’t force readers to spam your emails.

Once you’ve got there — there’s no way back to the reader’s inbox and you’re decreasing the trust of your emails all over your email provider.

We’ve all received such pushy and aggressive emails from sales who are trying to be innovative with their texts. But, in reality, it looks really spammy, and the only reword that can be gained is a spam flag. We need to feel that line between a disposing personal approach and cheap, manipulative gypsy tricks. Be fair with your readers and bring real value with your emails. Don’t trick them.

No attachments.

It’s also a terrible idea to send attachments using bulk emailing services like MailChimp. You might even have sincere intentions (like sharing your marketing research in .pdf attachment), but email providers don’t think that it’s a good idea.

True spam emails often contain inappropriate attachments, so it’s no surprise that email servers react to such emails this way.

Newsletter Welcome Sequence

Treat every new subscriber as if you’re in an episode of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. Consider your newsletter an extension of your home and ask your guests: Won’t you be my neighbor? Consider the welcome sequence the equivalent of having a retail location and you greet and aim to help potential customers when they walk into the store. A welcome sequence communicates your brand story, your “why,” and what to expect in terms of product, content, and offers.

Why is a Welcome Sequence Important?

Your welcome email is your first impression, and it’s probably one of the most important emails you’ll write. Why is this critical in your email marketing strategy? Because it’s sent at a time when someone has raised their hand and said they want to learn more from you and statistically, this email will have the highest open rates and engagement of any you’ll ever send.

Subscribers who receive welcome emails are 40% more likely to read emails from you over 180 days, and they’ll drive 3x the revenue of other marketing communications. Why? Your welcome email is their first encounter with you, and if they’re feeling your vibe and brand from the get-go, they’ll likely be a rabid fan and customer.

How to set up a Welcome Sequence in MailChimp: This is an excellent step-by-step tutorial from Mailchimp (with graphics).

Smart ways:

The email should come from a person, not a company (even including a photo in the signature is advised).
Avoid gimmicky, click-bait that will drive spam. You can use a free service like Spam Assassin to check your emails before you send them.
Split test (i.e., A/B test) subject lines and welcome emails. Once you have a few hundred subscribers, you can optimize our welcome communication for the next wave. Make only ONE change when split testing because then you can see what’s working/not working. If you make multiple changes, you won’t know for sure which change drove impact.

What to Say:

You’re in the courting phase. Something about you or your business piqued a subscriber’s interest, and they naturally want to learn more. Tell them your Signature Story. Tell them about your products and your competitive difference. Essentially, you’re telling them why you’re in their inbox. Set expectations of the kinds of content they’ll receive and how frequently they should hear from you.

The Welcome Sequence can be triggered upon a proactive subscription (i.e., newsletter sign-up) or a sale (after order information).

EMAIL #1 Goal

Briefly introduce new subscribers to your brand. Start by celebrating and thanking them for their trust and what it means to you that they’ve joined your passion and adventure-hungry tribe. Build trust and provide unexpected value setting expectations of what they’ll receive from you. Get them to take action and learn more via your website or deliver an initial special offer. Consumers love getting rewarded with a special offer, and they tend to convert to sales as a result.

When to send: Send as soon as they subscribe.
Content thought-starters:

§Start with: Briefly introduce who you are, what you do and your products. Hint: have some fun with it!

§ Middle: Head back to our ideal client profile and write a few sentences that show them that you truly understand them and the challenges they face (that you have solutions for!). When you get sophisticated, you can create sequences by product category, so it gets even more specific.

§ End with: Over the next few days we’ll be <insert what you plan to cover in the rest of your series!> In the meantime, head over to (insert a link to another channel you want them to visit!). You can also end with an offer. Remember, people are more engaged in this email than they will ever be, so getting them to take action now is vital!

§ Don’t forget: P.S. To make sure these emails get to you, please add <insert email> to your contacts list! P.P.S <Make sure there’s a place for them to unsubscribe!>

EMAIL #2 Goal

Dive deeper into the brand story and vision. Now is the time to tell your Signature Story, your “why.” Inspire them with your why and the brand vision.

When to send: Send two days after first communication.
Content thought-starters:

§ Start with: What’s your signature story? Why did you start your business?

§ Middle: What makes you different or unique? What’s your secret sauce that your competitors don’t have? Learn on your positioning statement and benefit messaging.

§ Engagement Point: Invite them to reply to the email and engage with a question!

§ End with: Let them know you have one more email left for them (and hint that it’s FULL of goodies made just for them) and link to other places they can follow you online if it makes sense!

EMAIL #3 Goal

Build trust and provide unexpected value and end your time together by setting expectations. Solve a problem they signed up to follow you for and solve it. Offer them a special offer or discount for signing up or remind them of their code if they haven’t redeemed it.

When to send: Send two days after second communication.
Content thought-starters:

§ Start with: Thank them for spending their time with you!

§ Middle: Include links to some of your top posts, social media content, influencer content, etc. Try to cover a variety of topics so everyone can find something they’d be interested in clicking through to read more! Show them right off the bat that you’re not here to sell, but also to educate and inspire them to crush their goals. Most retailers have a straight-up coupon offer, but go the extra mile and show them that you understand her needs and have created content that addresses them.

§ Blog or Social post 1: Brief post description + link

§ Blog or Social post 2: Brief post description + link

§ Blog or Social post 3: Brief post description + link

§ End with: Let them know from here on out they’ll be receiving your regularly scheduled emails. Make sure before you leave them in this welcome series that they know what to expect from you next. Write a sentence about what type of content you plan on sharing. You can close with your special offer/promotion for signing up. Even if they saw it when they signed up, remind them of it, so they’re encouraged to go to your website as the next step after this email!

Membership has its Privileges

Treat your readers like VIPs and offer them exclusive content, offers, and perks they can’t get anywhere else. When people join your email list, they’re telling you that they’re interested in what you have to offer and they’re inviting you into their inbox. We’re all wise to the game and, at one point, they know they’ll be sold to so don’t be afraid to ask for the sale! Just earn it by serving your subscribers content that is useful, valuable, entertaining, education, or a mix of the four.

If you need any help, or if you have questions, write me to golamasad.pias@yahoo.com