Setup the foundations for a successful Email Marketing strategy.

Email Marketing: it’s a realm of both simplicity and complexity, depending on your strategy.

At its best, email marketing has the potential to not only greatly increase revenue, but transform businesses across the board – from acquiring new customers and capturing Zero-party Data, to nurturing existing ones and gathering reviews.

It serves as a cornerstone to any successful marketing strategy.

With a clear, strategic approach and a commitment to continual improvement, this success is within reach.

Just as we at Orbit have refined our strategy to ensure success for all our clients, we invite you to learn the foundational Seven Pillars that underpin our Email Marketing Success.

1. Building an Email List
   Imagine throwing a party without sending out invitations – sure, you’ve got all the snacks and decorations, but where’s the fun without guests?
   
   

—> That’s why the first step is developing a strong method for acquiring emails. We can achieve this with an Email sign-up form. Here are the keys to a compelling form:

• Effective pop-up(s). Capture your visitors’ attention with visually appealing pop-ups that appear strategically, when they enter the store and just as they’re about to leave your store. Offer them an irresistible incentive to stay.
  
  
• Attractive incentive. Yes you can provide the classic 10% off, but this is also a chance to get creative – perhaps you implement a ‘spin the wheel for a reward’ feature, or an entry to an exciting giveaway.
  
  
• Diversify Sign-up Channels: Don’t limit your sign-up opportunities to just your website. Explore other channels like social media, paid ads, or wherever your audience engages with your brand.
  
  
• Bonus tip: Take the sign-up form as an opportunity to collect valuable zero-party and segment your audience. For instance, if you’re a gym supplements brand, use the form to inquire about your customers’ fitness goals – whether it’s weight loss or muscle gain. This allows you to segment your audience immediately and tailor your marketing efforts for maximum impact.
  
  

You can use Klaviyo to create a sign-up form integrated with your Shopify.

2. Establishing Sending Infrastructure

Because your Emails deserve better than a vacation in the spam folder.

Before you launch any campaigns, it’s super important to first ensure you have a strong sending infrastructure to allow for a high delivery rate. Otherwise, you’re missing out on huge chunks of revenue.

So how do you do it?

1. Firstly, we recommend setting up a dedicated sending domain. This will allow for more control over your sender reputation.
2. Ensure a good ‘senders reputation’: You can use tools like Google Postmaster to track reputation. Use this data to measure and correlate changes in your sender reputation with changes in your email sending practices.
3. Don’t immediately jump into large-scale campaigns (if your domain is new). Start with engaging automated flows and let them run for 2-4 weeks to ‘warm up’.
4. High Email Engagement: Focus on boosting metrics like Open Rate and Click Rate – your subject lines and CTAs are crucial here.

Optimizing sending infrastructure is a complex subject with many more technicalities and intricacies worth exploring. If you’re serious about Email Marketing and want to maximize email-attributed revenue, we seriously recommend checking out our course ‘Ultimate Email Marketing’. We delve into this topic in much greater depth and spill the beans on the exact strategies we use to drive revenue and growth. Whether you’re an e-commerce store owner, digital marketer, or agency owner, there’s a wealth of valuable insights waiting for you.

3. Zero-party Data & Customer profiling strategy

Understanding your customers isn’t just a good practice – it’s essential. That’s where zero-party data and customer profiling come into play.

Zero-party data is the holy grail of customer insights. It’s the information willingly shared by your customers including preferences, interests, and needs which allows you to tailor your marketing efforts precisely to their expectations. This isn’t about guesswork; it’s about building a genuine connection based on real knowledge.

So, how do you harness this treasure trove of data? There are many strategies to collect Zero-party Data. From the initial sign-up form, to Review Request Flows, and qualitative research campaigns – but typically the higher up the sales funnel the better.

Use this data to then segment your audience based on their unique traits, behaviors, and interactions. With this, you can craft hyper-personalized email journeys that resonate deeply with each individual.

But remember, personalization isn’t a one-time effort; it’s an ongoing journey. Encourage your customers to update their profiles through engaging campaigns and various touchpoints along their journey. The more you know about them, the better you can serve them.

4. Segmentation strategy

At the beginning of your email marketing journey, you’ll want to start with a broad segmentation strategy that targets the whole market. For example: segments based on engagement tiers including 60, 90 and 120 days since product order or Email open/click.

But, if you’ve implemented a Zero-party data & Customer profiling strategy, you will have a pool of beautiful customer data at your fingertips. At this point you should know the customer’s goals and why they’re shopping on your website. This is where we can add further value. Utilize this data to push customers into flows based on their preferences. For example, let’s say you own a chocolate store and the data shows they prefer dark chocolate – you can then put them into a segment with a higher focus on your dark chocolate products.

But there’s a problem. Customer behavior changes over time and can be unpredictable. If you’re a store with a well-defined niche and proposition, go broad with the majority of your targeting in campaigns. For stores with a wider-range of products, you can afford to implement more targeted campaigns/flows – the key is creating a strategy that caters for an on-going journey. Encourage your customers to update their profiles through engaging campaigns and various touchpoints along their journey.

5. Core Flows

Any effective Email Marketing strategy needs it’s core flows. Triggered by customer behavior, these flows are the powerhouse – they capture the majority of email-attributed revenue and drive the most traffic.

• Welcome Flow
• Abandoned Cart Flow
• Post-purchase Flow
• Browse-abandonment flow
  
  

If Email Marketing is your game plan, these core flows are your winning strategy. Dive deep into each one in our dedicated blog post Email Flows and become a pro of the flow.

6. Email Campaigns

With your sending infrastructure set up, email list built-up, and core flows in place, it’s a great time to kick-off your Email campaigns.

But don’t rush it! Start small and gradually build momentum. A frequency of one campaign per fortnight is ideal. This allows you to fine-tune your approach, making incremental improvements along the way.

Email campaigns are a powerful weapon in your marketing arsenal. They can be leveraged to achieve different goals – whether it’s launching a new product, boosting engagement, conducting qualitative research, or gathering User-Generated Content.

For a deeper dive into crafting effective campaigns, exploring advanced strategies, and measuring success, check out our Email Campaigns section in our Free Course .

7. Reporting & Refining

At this point it’s a good time to delve into more aggressive A/B testing across sign-up forms, Core Flows and Email Campaigns.

This is where many marketers go wrong. They test the wrong elements, and often either over-test and struggle to acquire meaningful findings, or under-test and leave potential revenue untapped.

To ensure an effective A/B Testing strategy, use these three steps:

1. Sufficient sample size
2. Clearly identify metrics to track with a specific goal in mind (eg, Click Rate or Conversions)
3. Allow enough time for testing to yield accurate results.
   
   

Typically, the best tests to leverage are:

• Subject lines
• CTAs (Calls To Action)
• Timing
• Frequency
• Offer vs no offer
• Email vs SMS
• Utilization of Zero-part Data. Explore various ways to leverage this data; the testing possibilities are endless if you’re creative enough.
  
  

Track and measure your key metrics against the adjustments made to refine your strategies.

Conclusion

As we wrap up our exploration of the Seven Pillars of Email Marketing Success, it’s clear that focusing on these foundational elements is key to driving results. While sophisticated automation has its place, it’s mastering the fundamentals that truly moves the needle, accounting for over 90% of your success, especially in revenue generation.

Concentrate on the strategies outlined in this guide, and once you’ve built a solid foundation with the Seven Pillars of Email Marketing Success, you can begin refining your setup.

I delve into this and many more advanced strategies in Our Ultimate Email Marketing Course. I reveal all the industry secrets and tactics I use to drive revenue for my clients. Whether you’re an ecom store owner, digital marketer, or agency owner – you don’t want to miss out!