by Beccy Stanley, CraikJones

Email marketing strategy should be nothing new to you - as with all other communications strategies, it will be dependent, above all, on your current situation and your goals and vision for your brand’s future.

This leads to questions that need to be asked about your audience, competitive environment and your wider marketing mix.

Who is your audience?

This includes elements such as:

• How your desired audience consumes online (and offline) media?
• What do they want from your communications?
• What needs are you looking to fulfil?
• What technology is available to them? (e.g. will they be viewing it on a handheld device)
• What do you want them to think?
• What action do you want them to take?

What is everyone else doing?

A review of competitor activity in this area is essential because it could highlight an opportunity for exploitation e.g. if there is a gap in the market or if you can dramatically improve on their offering. Make sure you are very focussed on who / what you need to cover because the sheer size and complexity of most markets can lead to messages getting lost.

How does it fit with your wider marketing mix?

To ensure that whatever communication method you employ is seen as one in an ongoing series of emotional interactions with subscribers, not a series of one-off messages your email strategy must also be reviewed in conjunction with other elements in the wider marketing mix. This will help ensure that it either fills a gap or enhances work done by other media to create a continuous and coherent customer journey.

This last point is especially important given recent research conducted by Dr Nicola Millard, BT's customer experience futurologist. Dr Millard found that customers using two marketing channels spent 114% more money than single channel shoppers, while those using three channels were 48% more profitable than those who just used two. This demonstrates the importance of considering email as one of the customer touch points, which must be included within a multi-channel communications strategy to maximise revenues.

What email can achieve?

Once all of these questions have been addressed and your future vision for your brand is understood against over its current position, the marketing need you are trying to fulfil will become clear. Looking at this alongside the myriad capabilities of email, you can establish which of the following it can achieve:

• Awareness generation
• Provision of clear calls to action to drive prospects and customers to other digital content
• Prospect / customer welcome
• Delivery of transactional information
• Data validation
• Incremental data gathering
• Continual customer engagement
• Conversion to sale (both directly and by supporting sales in other channels e.g. in store)
• Encourage repeat purchase/loyalty
• Cross / up-sell to existing prospect / customer base
• Drive word of mouth (through friend referral)
• Increase weight of purchase

Whatever your strategy, you must leverage the key strategic difference of email against other marketing channels - that it is (when done properly) removed from the traditional ‘interruptive’ model of communication. Consumers opt-in to receive messages and can be very specific about what they want to get out of it through a well-structured preferences tool.

This gives you the perfect opportunity to communicate only with an audience that you are confident is interested in what you have to say and sell. This model of ‘permission’ marketing enables you to focus on building, developing and maintaining relationships - by fulfilling the needs and wants of existing and potential customers through targeted, relevant communications to increase lifetime customer value.