A Winning Email Marketing Strategy for Your Tech Startup
If you’re a tech startup without an email marketing strategy in place, you’re missing out on the best inbound strategy your marketing dollars can buy.
If you’re a tech startup with an email marketing strategy in place but it’s not your highest converting marketing channel, you’re still neglecting valuable opportunities to build better connections and further relationships with your existing customers.
In either case, the good news is that when done right, email marketing is the most effective marketing channel across industries when it comes to converting subscribers for B2C businesses– the average ROI on email marketing (depending on your specific niche) is between $36 and $42 for every $1 spent.
Not only can email give you the best chance to move your audience from interest in your solution to actually considering a purchase, it allows you to provide your existing customers with continuous value, deepening your relationship and connection with them.
Follow along as we dig into the best practices for an effective email marketing strategy. In this article we’ll explore the following:
Understanding your target audience
Setting clear objectives
Building an email list
The power of email segmentation
Measuring your email marketing performance
Spam prevention
Understanding and Defining Your Ideal Subscriber
The first step to developing an effective email marketing strategy is to gather as much information on your current and potential subscribers as possible.
Who are the people who actually benefit from being on your email list?
Generally this will be the same persona as your target audience. The people who are likely to find value in your product or service will more than likely find value in your expertise in general if you can package it into digestible pieces.
Learn as Much as Possible About Your Buyer
The best way to take full advantage of your email marketing efforts is to base all of your email content off of your customer data.
What major pain points seem to come up repeatedly during your customer service exchanges?
What will make their daily tasks easier?
No one knows your audience like you– email gives you the chance to provide much needed value to your customers that they aren’t getting anywhere else.
This then positions your brand as an authority they can look to when other issues arise in their everyday workflows, which builds trust and a well-nurtured relationship with those who use your products or services regularly.
Define Exactly Who You Will make Your Content For
Once you’ve analyzed who your buyer is and what their needs are, the next step is to narrow this definition down to be as specific as possible.
As the saying goes, “content written for everybody is content written for nobody” meaning the best way to make valuable content that will resonate with your audience is to have a specific buyer persona in mind when you consider who will need your content and what they will be needing it for.
Setting Clear Objectives
Defining your objectives at the outset will go a long way towards helping you reach your goals as efficiently as possible. Your email marketing campaigns will typically cater to customers as they move through these funnel phases:
Interest
Lead
Sales Qualified Lead
Customer
Your email marketing goals should coincide with these phases so that you can effectively move your subscribers through each one.
You might want your SQLs to attend webinars or take part in live demos in which case you’d build email sequences highlighting the value they would receive by participating in these events.
If you’re looking to boost revenue, email campaigns focused on the bottom of funnel content are a great way to promote service upgrades or new products.
Build Your Email List
The more subscribers you can add to your email list the more worthwhile your marketing efforts will be.
Taking this idea a step further– the best way to fully optimize the effectiveness of your list is to build a list full of leads.
At CRCA, we help our tech clients build their subscriber lists through the use of lead magnets.
These are assets that startups can offer their audience in exchange for email addresses and can be a powerful way to get customers that are already heavily considering your solution onto your subscriber list.
Your lead magnet should have a wellspring of insight and value that your target audience will find highly useful. Examples of lead magnets are white papers, ebooks, webinars, templates/guides, free-trial subscriptions, etc.
Lead magnets provide a great opportunity to position yourself as an authority to your audience while building trust. From here, you can send them relevant content and work them further through your funnel.
The Power of Segmentation
This goes deeper into the part of the strategy that builds out specific emails for subscribers according to where they’re at in your sales funnel. While this is a good place to start, in order to keep your ROI as high as possible, at CRCA we’ve found that segmenting subscribers into distinct targeted groups yields the best results.
Here are a few examples of segments that work:
Onboarding Emails for New Interested Subscribers
You can engage new subscribers by sending emails highlighting your most popular features or giving them the background on your brand’s story if it’s relevant to your USP and why customers might be interested in your solution.
Subscribers With High Open Rates
Make a segment for your subscribers who are opening 40% of your emails or higher. This is a good indication that they are very interested in your product or solution and are ready to move further down the funnel.
Send Promotional and First-To-Know Emails to Highly Engaged Readers
Create a segment for the people on your list who actively attend webinars, download templates, write reviews, etc. This is a great opportunity to make them feel appreciated by giving them exclusive access and special offers.
Tracking Email Performance
To fully optimize your email marketing strategy you’ll need to evaluate the performance of your email campaigns so you can build on what is working well with your audience and make adjustments to the components that are underperforming.
Here are some of the major email marketing KPIs you’ll want to pay attention to when evaluating your strategy:
Open Rate
This is the percentage of recipients who open your sent emails. Open rates can be optimized through A/B testing subject lines and adjusting which segments are being sent what content.
Click Thru Rate
This metric tracks how many readers clicked a hyperlink, CTA button, image and any other links within an email. Finding out which subscribers have higher click through tendencies allows you to target them more effectively with respect to your email marketing goals.
Conversion Rate
This measures how effectively your emails can get your reader to take an action– this could be making a service upgrade, signing up for an event, or any specific action that was set as the goal of your email.
Bounce Rate
A “bounced” email is one that’s been rejected by an email server after being sent to an invalid address. Keeping track of how many of your sent emails are “bounced” is important for keeping a tidy subscriber list and helps to keep your reputation as a sender high.
Spam Prevention
The perfectly planned strategy means nothing if the emails you’re sending end up landing in your subscriber’s spam folders instead of in their primary inbox.
Here are some tips to give you the best chance to avoid your emails being labeled as spam:
Avoid spam-trigger words in your subject lines– “free”, “win $$”, “action required”.
Only send emails to users that have opted-in to your email list.
Send emails regularly (weekly to bi-weekly at the least).
Avoid deceptive subject lines. We’ve all been sent emails claiming to contain life changing information only to be let down when we opened it. This increases your chances of being flagged as spam.
Include an “unsubscribe” button in the footer of all emails in order to comply with the CAN-SPAM act.
Email Marketing With Us
At CRCA we build custom email marketing strategies based on your business goals. Starting with taking a deep dive into who your customers are, what their needs are, and what aspects of your offer resonate with them, we make sure that the content we create provides them with value they can use.
We build impactful lead magnets to facilitate email sign ups, segment your audience accordingly, and evaluate the performance of our strategy on a consistent basis in order to fully optimize your email marketing channel.
If you’d be interested in learning more about how we can build a winning email marketing strategy for your business, contact us today!