Let Your Newsletters Make a Lasting Impression with the Right Email Marketing Concept
How to create a successful email marketing concept - tips for designing and implementing newsletters with CleverReach.
Do you have an email marketing concept or do you simply send out the occasional newsletter to all your recipients? No offense to the second option, that’s definitely better than NOT sending any newsletters.
However, when it comes to successful email marketing, it is essential to have a well thought out concept. This post shows you how to create your concept, how to implement it and how it supports your email marketing strategy to make your email campaigns even more effective and help you reach your target group better.
- What is the difference between an email marketing strategy and an email marketing concept?
- Why do I need an email marketing concept?
- How do I create a successful and effective email marketing concept?
- Best Practices for newsletter concepts and implementation
- Success factors: Evaluation and optimization of your email marketing concept
- How to improve your email marketing concept with each email you send out
- Summary: Support your marketing strategy with your email marketing concept
What is the difference between an email marketing strategy and an email marketing concept?
We have to admit – both terms are often used interchangeably, but they definitely have different meanings:
An email marketing strategy is a long-term plan specifying the goals and general apporach for you email marketing activities. The strategy describes how you want to structure your email campaigns, defines the types of content you want to create, who your target group is and how you want to track the success of your campaigns.
An email marketing concept is tactically planning a specific email campaign. The concept is a short-term plan that points out in detail what a specific email campaign contains, how often it should be sent out and who the target group of this campaign is.
Speaking of campaign: this term also plays an essential role in planned email marketing. An email marketing campaign is the implementation of your email marketing strategy or concept. It’s the actual email that you send to your subscribers to transfer your marketing message and reach your goals. A campaign can be part of a long-term strategy or an independent concept.
Why do I need an email marketing concept?
An email marketing concept helps you achieve your goals more effectively. As part of creating your concept, you need to think about and define these goals. The same applies to your target group: By asking “Who is my target group?“ you get to know and understand your target group better. The result is better targeting, better content, and better results.
Without a conceptual framework, you are sending out your email campaign in a scattergun fashion: All of your subscribers get the same unspecific message. The advantage (especially for us 😉): you send out lots of emails. The disadvantage: You have a low response rate and therefore low return on investment. If you have a clear concept, you’re sending out newsletters to only a part of your recipients and your emails get more personalized – your content meets the needs and interests of your readers. With a professional email marketing tool like CleverReach this is very easy to do. Filter your recipients with segments and tags.
An email marketing concept does not only need clear objectives but also tracking of results by keeping an eye on essential KPIs such as opens, clicks and conversions. This is the only way to objectively evaluate the effectiveness of your campaign.
We know: developing an email marketing concept takes some work, but the rewards make it all worth it.
The benefits of an elaborate email marketing concept are:
- Typically much higher open and click rates
- higher conversions rates and revenue
- More targeted customer retention
- More efficient and effective campaigns overall, due to increased relevance through personalized content that is more relevant to your customers/readers
How do I create a successful and effective email marketing concept?
Here are some elements you should always consider when developing a consistent email marketing concept:
Set clear goals
Your goal is the starting point for your email marketing concept: Before you start creating content, think about what ou want to achieve with your emails. Do you want to
- increase traffic on your website,
- win new customers,
- generate more sales,
- win qualified leads,
- improve customer retention or
- raise brand awareness?
- A combination of some of the above?
Make sure that your goals are realistic and measurable so you can track the success of your campaigns and improve future campaigns step-by-step. Define SMART goals:
Specific
measurable
attainable
relevant and
time-based.
Define Your Target Group
Do you know why your recipients have subscribed to your newsletter? What do they expect from your emails – what is their age and gender, and what other characteristics do they have?
You should know your target group well to provide them with relevant content and engage their interaction with your emails. The definition of your target group should not only be based on demographic factors such as age, gender and income, but also on interests, needs and purchasing behavior. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Who are my newsletter subscribers?
- What are they interested in?
- What does their purchase behavior look like?
- Which channels are they active on?
- How can I meet their needs and wishes with my campaign?
Leverage as many data sources as possible. This could be:
- Surveys – e.g. send them out via email to your recipients
- Analysis software on your website, e.g. Google Analytics
- Customer data from your CRM or online shop. Directly import these data in your recipient list via plugin and use them for your email marketing. Take a look at our list of CleverReach Newsletter Integrations.
- Social Media – especially in a B2B environment – can also give valuable insights on what your readers are interested in. Analyze the activities of your target group on channels like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and learn more about their interests, preferences and opinions.
You don’t know these kinds of data yet? Our email marketing tool helps you extending your knowledge about your recipients through tagging and data fields.
Use, for example, the data field “Salutation” to differentiate between male and female recipients. Or collect more information on their interests by placing tag ins your newsletters that get attached to a recipient’s dataset as soon as they click on it. This way you get a differentiated picture of your newsletter recipients.
Plan your email types
What kind of emails do you want to send out? Examples for email types are
- Welcome emails or entire welcome series
- Offer and promotion newsletters
- Follow ups
- Birthday and holiday emails
- Re-engagement emails
- Sale emails
- Trigger emails, for example after an abandoned cart
Plan your content
One of the key components of successful email marketing is compelling content. Your emails should be interesting, relevant and useful to arouse interest in your recipients.
Of course, what engages your audience depends on your business:
As a blogger, your latest blog posts or exclusive offers that have something to do with the content of your blog are ideal. You’re blogging about Scotland? Point out interesting TV documentaries about Scotland or great travel deals to the locations of your stories.
Online shop operators generate their opens with sale newsletters, but also with product previews or exclusive event invitations.
Looks matter, too: make sure your emails have a clear and structured design and match your Corporate design. Use expressive images, videos, appealing headlines and graphics to deliver your message.
Create beautiful emails in no time with our intuitive Newsletter Editor. With just a few clicks, you can customize our email templates to look exactly how you want your newsletter to look.
Videos cannot be directly embedded, but can be made available by linking to them in your newsletter.
Consider Opt-in and legal requirements
One of the legal requirements, in particular, is Double Opt-in. Recipients have to actively give their consent to receive your emails. It is also mandatory to provide the Legal Notice and the Privacy Policy. An email marketing concept should be in line with these aspects and be in compliance with all legal requirements. You can easily cross this item off your agenda if you use CleverReach: our email marketing software protects you on all these fronts by default.
Plan your campaign: Determine frequency and timing
How often should you send out newsletters? What is a good – or appropriate – frequency will depend on your industry and what your goals are. Some companies send daily emails, others weekly or monthly. The key is finding the right balance between too many and too few. An overflow of emails can have a negative effect as they can be perceived as spam. But too few emails can make recipients lose interest in your content. In the worst case, recipients may even forget they subscribed to your newsletter and mark it as spam. Not only does this result in unread emails, but it also negatively impacts your sender reputation, making your emails more likely to end up in spam folders.
It’s also quite important to find out at what time your recipients read your emails. Some companies have found it works best to send their emails early in the morning or late at night, while others send their emails during regular business hours. This varies by industry, company, and audience.
This means that there is no single best time to send newsletters. The best way to find the optimal time to send your newsletter to your subscribers is A/B testing. Compare open and click-through rates by sending your email to two groups of the same size at different times or days of the week.
Best Practices for newsletter concepts and implementation
Done with your newsletter marketing concept? That’s great! But there’s no resting. Now it’s a matter of how to put the concept into practice.
There are some proven best practices you should follow when creating newsletters.
- Subject line: Choose a clear and engaging subject line to pique the interest of your readers. Don’t promise anything the newsletter can’t deliver, and really take your time writing it. Have you really entered the best possible subject? Our tool won’t let you down and gives you the opportunity to tweak your subject right before sending.
- Personalization: To create a more personal relationship, use your subscribers’ names and address them individually. You can also improve open rates and retention by tailoring your content to personal interests and needs. To do this, you need to know your audience.
- Relevance: Be sure your content is relevant to your target audience and in line with their interests.
- Layout: Keep your content clear and understandable by structuring and designing it well.
- Consistency: Send your newsletters on a regular basis and stick to a set schedule. Recipients feel you care when they hear from you regularly – an effective way to retain customers. A regular schedule can help you keep track.
- Responsive Design: Make sure you design your newsletter in a responsive way and automatically adapts to different screen sizes, which increases readability and usability.
Success Factors: Evaluation and optimization of your email marketing concept
Is your email marketing concept working? And how can you optimize your email newsletters? It’s simple: analyze different key figures like open and click rates, conversion rates or the unsubscribe rate on a regular basis. By regularly reviewing your metrics, you can determine which campaigns are successful and which ones need to be optimized.
When using a professional email marketing tool like CleverReach, the key figures are constantly tracked. You get the results in real-time in your Reports section.
This will help you improve your email marketing KPIs:
Tips for higher open and click rates
There are several levers you can use to improve your open and click-through rates:
To achieve a high open and click rate, it is important that you provide your customers with relevant content that addresses their needs and interests. How can you make this happen? This brings us back to the subject line: An attractive subject line with a personalized address is particularly effective. By addressing the recipient by name, the recipient feels more personally addressed and is more likely to open the email. They are very likely to click on a link to your website or online store when they find content that is relevant to their interests. Speaking of clicking the online store link, this next point is important for online stores:
Tips for increasing conversion rates
Especially online shops can take a closer look at the conversion rate to see the success of their email marketing concept: how much sales did the newsletter campaign generate?
There are several things you can do to increase conversions, including a clear call-to-action, a personalized message, and an attractive email design. You should also make sure that the entire purchase process, from registration to a completed purchase, is simple and uncomplicated to not loose your customers.
These are all important factors in the customer journey. But here’s the most important tip for higher conversions: Leverage your knowledge of your recipients’ preferences to deliver offers that are in line with their past clicks and purchases.
You don’t have any recipient data yet? Then offer them something else. For example, send them exclusive offers that they can only benefit from as a newsletter subscriber.
How to improve your email marketing concept with each email you send out
You’ve built your concept step-by-step, thought about your goals and audiences, sent out beautifully designed newsletters with personalized content – and then checked your KPIs and tweaked everything again? It could hardly be better. But wait, you still have a very valuable opportunity to optimize your email marketing concept: Use customer feedback! The opinions of your recipients can be very valuable to the further improvement of your email marketing concept. Get direct feedback from your recipients with surveys or feedback forms. Consider their feedback when planning and optimizing future email campaigns.
Summary: Support your email marketing strategy with your email marketing concept
Having an Email Marketing concept in place can significantly help your marketing strategy succeed.
It is critical that you keep your strategic goals in mind and that they are reflected in your email marketing concept. In this way, your email marketing concept helps you plan, organize, and monitor your marketing activities to more effectively achieve your marketing goals.
You need a powerful email marketing software like CleverReach to successfully implement your email marketing campaign. It lets you automate campaigns, send personalized emails and track campaign results. With CleverReach, it’s easy to optimize your campaigns and get better results – increasing your business success. Just give it a try.
Or use CleverReach as an integration and, e.g., download the WordPress-CleverReach plugin and get 10% off for the first 12 months!
