Building an Integrated Email Marketing Strategy

Once you know who you’ll be talking to with your emails, you’re ready to put together a strategy for integrating your email marketing with your other digital marketing channels. The information you gathered from talking with your audience and scouring your data will be crucial to identifying channels and key types of content to put in play with your email marketing strategy.

Channels

Which channels does your target audience use? Which channels help you reach your business objectives? Which channels convert? Which channels bring the most engagement? Answer these questions in order to identify the most important channels for reaching your target audience.

Content

What kinds of content does your target audience resonate with most? Which kinds of content help you reach your business objectives? Which kinds of content convert? Which kinds of content get higher engagement for your target audience? Have a list of content types ready as you move into planning.

Plan

With your audience’s prime channels and key types of content in mind, create an email marketing strategy that includes content creation, repurposing, amplification and distribution. Each element should be set up to drive traffic toward your primary objective, be that purchases or email sign-ups on your website or engagement on a social network.

Things to include in your integrated email marketing strategy:

• Concrete goals (e.g. drive traffic to website, promote sales, etc.)
• Target segments
• Sending frequency
• Schedule with deadlines
• Tactics for integration (see below)
• How you’ll track your progress

As you’re planning tactics for integration, consider starting with what HubSpot has dubbed “The Big 3”: social media, search engines and mobile. Here are a few tips for each to help you get started.

Social Media

• Add social sharing buttons to email
• Put email sign-up call-to-actions on social networks
• Segment emails based on social media insights

Search Engines

• Create HTML versions of your emails & host them on the web
• Optimize your HTML emails for search engines, e.g. use the best keywords and anchor text, ensure all images have alt tags, include social media sharing buttons
• Use Google’s pay-per-click Adwords to direct search traffic to an email sign-up landing page

Mobile

• Make sure buttons and links are easy to tap
• Create plain text and HTML versions of your emails
• Use descriptive alt text with all images
• Test your emails on different devices
• Optimize the landing pages to which your emails link
• Let new subscribers opt in via text message
• Develop an app that collect emails

(Check out more mobile email tips in our post “Mobile Friendly Email Marketing Basics.”)

Whatever your strategy looks like, be sure to write it down. A documented email marketing strategy with timelines and who owns what will keep your team on task and provide a resource anyone can return to for reference.

Email is more powerful when it’s integrated with the rest of your digital channels. Check back in two weeks for the next step in integrating your email marketing: identity.

Ready to get started? Contact Filament.