How to Develop an Email Marketing Solution for Your Brand

email lists

Email marketing strategies are multi-faceted and require a lot of forethought and planning to be successful.

Your Brafton team, composed of a content marketing strategist, project manager and content writer, designer and consultant, will work together to manage every aspect of your email campaigns.

Through Brafton’s expertise in full-service email marketing, including campaign management and newsletter writing services, you can rest assured each email communication is tailored to reach targeted recipients and drive return on investment.

Here are seven steps to developing an email marketing solution that works for your brand, and how Brafton can help every step of the way:

1. Choose an Email Service Provider

1. Choose an Email Service Provider

First thing’s first: You’ll need an ESP (email service provider). ESPs provide email marketing software that allows businesses to send bulk emails and collect, store, and organise email addresses and other contact information. More advanced ESPs have additional tools that allow you to:

  • Conduct A/B testing.
  • Segment leads.
  • Create forms for your website.
  • Add dynamic content to your emails.

There are many options out there, and Brafton has experience using most of them, including Mailchimp, HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot.

2. Build a Mailing List

2. Build a Mailing List

Next, you need a list of contacts that you can send your email communications to.

You can quickly develop an email list through the strategic use of customised website pop-ups, eye-catching calls to action and newsletter subscription form fills placed throughout your website. Gated content such as valuable eBooks and informative white papers are also effective ways to encourage people to sign up for your email newsletter and other communications.

The result is a strong list of recipients who are interested in your brand and want to receive your content.

Once you have a list of recipients, it’s essential to segment it to ensure your content is crafted to maximise desired outcomes. Targeted emails require at least some level of personalisation, which makes customer segmentation critical for a strategic email marketing programme. Your Brafton email management team helps you parse through subscribers based on criteria including age, gender, job title and more.

Email communications can then be tailored to each specific segment, ensuring your content marketing is pertinent and useful for recipients, supporting continued interest and trust in your brand.

3. Design Beautiful Email Templates + 4. Write Compelling Email Copy pt. 1

3. Design Beautiful Email Templates

Your emails have to look great for them to make a good impression with your readers. Every brand is different, so your email design should be tailored to your unique style.

Brafton’s in-house graphic design and technical services teams work together to create HTML email templates that capture reader attention. The email templates we create incorporate custom illustrations and imagery, calls to action and other design elements meant to encourage conversion and interaction.

Once your template is designed and uploaded into your ESP, you’ll be sending beautiful emails in no time.
 

4. Write Compelling Email Copy

Brafton’s industry-focused writers will incorporate email marketing best practices into the creation of original email copy geared toward your audience.

Content is based on specific subscriber personas to leverage the benefits of personalisation and encourage higher open and click-through rates. Everything from tone and style to structure can be tailored to your unique requirements.

email marketing

4. Write Compelling Email Copy pt. 2

newsletters

There are several components of great email copy:

Subject lines that cultivate engagement

Starting with subject lines that utilise language proven to inspire interest and urgency among recipients, your content writer will ensure your email communications are laser-focused on cultivating interest and engagement.

Custom-curated content

Most of the content that your emails feature can be created from scratch or curated based on your existing blog posts and other assets from your content marketing campaigns.

Your content marketing strategist and project manager can measure the performance of existing collateral to determine which pieces of content resonate most with your target audience based on website traffic, time on site, bounce rates and other metrics.

Using this information, emails can be created using repurposed content, both expanding the value of your current assets to subscribers and spreading awareness to new audiences. Your content writer will craft copy to provide email recipients with tantalising snapshots of your content, driving targeted traffic back to your website.

5. Develop an Email Marketing Strategy pt. 1

5. Develop an Email Marketing Strategy

Your email marketing strategy is about more than developing mailing lists and creating compelling email messages. You also need to consider 1) What types of emails to include and 2) When each one is used.

Types of emails to include in your marketing strategy

The type of email you choose depends on the message you want to convey. Here are some common types of marketing emails that Brafton create for clients:

Email newsletters

Email newsletters are often the first and most approachable form of email communications a person receives from a company. Fill them with entertaining or informative content, thought leadership pieces or coupon codes to encourage purchases.

Transactional emails

A transactional email is sent after a user completes some type of conversion, such as making a purchase or downloading a piece of content. Include details of the transaction and a message of gratitude in these emails.

Welcome emails

When someone signs up for email communications from your brand, you have just one chance to show them that sharing their email address with you was worth it. Welcome them to your community by sending them an email that shows thanks for their attention, explains your brand and previews the types of emails they’ll receive.

Sales or promotional emails

Your email list wants to know what you have to offer them, so tell them! Sales or promotional emails can share information about the products or services you provide, new offerings your audience will be interested in, company updates like expansions or leadership changes and more.

No matter the type of email communications you need to include in your email marketing programme, Brafton’s expert content creators can develop spot-on mailers your audience will respond well to.

5. Develop an Email Marketing Strategy pt. 2

When to deploy your emails

Each type of email should be strategically used and deployed only when appropriate. With many popular ESPs, you can set up trigger emails, designed to be sent after specific criteria are met. You can also create emails with dynamic content so each reader sees content that’s meant specifically for them.

Here are some criteria you might use in your email marketing campaigns:

  • Lead score change.
  • New contact sign-up.
  • Content download from website.
  • Left items in the shopping cart.
  • Requested a demo.
  • Clicked in a previous email.

Determining the right moment to send an email to a contact is a thought exercise that requires close understanding of user behaviour and audience expectations. Your content marketing team at Brafton can help you choose the triggers that are most appropriate for your brand to use in its email marketing strategy.

6. Set Up Your Campaigns + 7. Track Your Results pt. 1

6. Set Up Your Campaigns

Once you have all these elements in place, it’s time to set up your campaign. Each ESP has nuanced ways to do this, but Brafton’s expert email consultants have experience setting up and organising email campaigns across all major email marketing platforms.

Setting up your campaign may include:

  • Uploading your custom HTML template into your ESP.
  • Creating segmented mailing lists.
  • Adding copy to templates for specific email launches.
  • Building workflows that specify which emails will be sent, when.

Using your marketing platform for email automation will make your strategy into a robust system that continuously nurtures leads and develops a bond between your audience and your brand.
 

7. Track Your Results

Email marketing is a cyclical process that always has an eye on improvement. After your email campaign launches, it’s time to collect and review data to make sure it’s working how you expect it to.

Your content marketing specialist will gather information about your email performance, analyse it to determine how successful it is, present it to you and your team and make recommendations for how to improve.

marketing automation

7. Track Your Results pt. 2

Some of the most important metrics we analyse include:

  • Deliverability: Whether or not your emails are actually delivered to recipients’ inboxes.
  • Open rates: How many recipients opened the emails.
  • Click-through rates: How many recipients clicked in the emails.
  • Click-to-open rates: Of the people who opened it, how many of them clicked.
  • Unsubscribes: How many recipients opt out of email communications after receiving your email.
  • Website traffic: How much of your site traffic can be attributed to your email marketing programme.

Understanding these metrics and more gives you greater insight into your audience’s preferences and the smartest ways to market to them.

Email Marketing Services at Brafton

Email Marketing Services at Brafton

Email marketing is one of the strongest lead generation tools available to you. Brafton’s email marketing services will help you make the most of this powerful yet complex medium. A carefully designed email marketing programme will help build brand awareness, improve inbound marketing results and drive the conversions that matter most to your organisation.

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