Key takeaways ✨
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Email marketers don’t wear many hats—they wear them all. 🎩
So many of us get trapped in a doom loop of email request → email production → email send that we barely have time to think about the bigger picture. Nearly a quarter of all email marketers routinely manage eleven essential functions in their team, according to our State of Email Workflows Report.
But “so-and-so wants an email” is not an email marketing strategy. “We send an email once a week” is also not a strategy. To be able to max out email marketing’s 36:1 potential ROI, you need to think bigger about your audience, your messaging, and the technology you’re using to make it all happen.
This is what you need to know about email marketing strategies and how to create a plan that drives email ROI for even the busiest teams.
Table of contents
- Start with a strategy
- Components of an email marketing strategy
- The metrics to measure your success
- Building a cross-functional email marketing strategy
- Trends defining email marketing strategy right now
- Successful email marketing campaigns at each stage of the funnel
- The tools you need to bring your email marketing strategy to life
Start with a real email marketing strategy to avoid burnout, bottlenecks, and bad results
So what is an email marketing strategy? An email marketing strategy is a plan that outlines who you send to, what your goals are, and how you’ll achieve them. Email marketing teams use strategies to help everyone work toward common goals. They also help teams prioritize work when there’s too much on their plates.
An email strategy helps you:
- Sync up with your team. It’s not enough to assume your team and other departments are all on the same page—put everything in writing so collaboration is crystal clear.
- Review expectations vs. reality. Your vision is clear at the beginning of a project, but it’s easy to forget your plans once you get to work. Establishing an email marketing strategy helps you review your intentions to keep on task so you’re not constantly fielding requests from other team members wondering why “they didn’t get an email.”
- Spend your budget wisely. Email marketing is an investment, and tools like your email service provider (ESP) don’t always come cheap. Defining a strategy helps you prioritize where to spend your budget and what your team needs.
- Focus on a few projects at a time. You can’t do everything all the time, and an email strategy helps you decide which projects make the most sense for your audience and goals right now.
- Minimize disruptions. Sometimes, your teammates are out of work, your team grows, or responsibilities shift. Getting ideas and workflows out of your head and into a shared document smooths out disruptions if you need to pick up where someone left off.
When your latest campaign was due yesterday and you have a mile-long backlog of campaign ideas, taking a moment for long-term planning feels like, well—a low priority. But you’ll never convince the rest of your team how great email really is for your bottom line if you’re operating on a “it’s been a while since we’ve sent an email on x topic” kind of vibe.
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Components of your email marketing strategy
The first place to start with building an email marketing strategy is your goals. What do you want your emails to do? List a few primary goals, like driving website sales, increasing product awareness, or improving deliverability on a neglected email list. Adding a timeframe to these goals, like your annual or quarterly priorities, is helpful.
“To me, strategy is based on what you’re trying to help your audience do within a specific timeframe,” says Price. “The end goal doesn’t have to be numbers-based, like a certain amount of pipeline, although that’s great if it is. It’s more about how you’re going to engage that segment and make a positive change with your audience in some way.”
From there, you can think about:
1. Audience segmentation and buyer behavior
‘Customer segments’ are specific groups of your email list, and splitting up and tagging these groups helps you organize which email campaigns to send to whom. Do this right and it’s the most effective type of personalization you can do for your email marketing.
“Know your audience” is timeless marketing advice for a reason. Create a list of all the customer segments you send to and what criteria you use to identify those subscribers to stay organized.
With email, it’s not just knowing your audience’s preferences on whether they get your emails at 10 AM on a Tuesday or 3 PM on a Friday. It’s about delivering what information they need, when they need it. You wouldn’t send a “leave us a review” email to someone who has never made a purchase, right?
That same logic extends to the rest of the funnel. For example, you might send transactional and promotional emails, a recurring newsletter, sales campaigns, welcome sequences, onboarding flows, and more based on what your audience is doing on your website or how they interact with your products. It’s much better to send separate emails, focused on a specific program, product, or ask, than to cram a ton of information into one email. If you’re trying to speak to your entire audience for every email, you’re just going to leave folks confused.
LitTip: Your segments should determine the rest of your strategy.
2. Content planning across the subscriber lifecycle
How will you build a quality email list? Document your lead magnets, signup forms, single- or double opt-in stance, and list cleaning routine. Your list is what’s going to drive the rest of your content.
From there, map out the entire buyer’s journey. What does it take for someone to go from “yeah, I want to get emails from this brand,” to counting down the days until the next drop? Or eagerly hoping their boss will approve going to your big event?
It takes repetition from multiple marketing touchpoints—and a few key nudges from you along the way.
3. Testing, experimentation, and optimization
Teams invest a lot of time into email marketing, as you can tell by *gestures widely* all of this. All of that effort, plus the trust that customers place in your brand when they sign up for emails, means every message needs to look perfect and make it to the inbox.
Include a plan to test your emails, optimize deliverability, and improve future campaigns based on email insights. This includes A/B testing common elements like subject lines to increase open rates and pre-send testing to see how your email appears in multiple email clients and devices.
If you’re not testing, you’re not learning. Because even though it’s “best practice” to optimize for major email clients like Apple Mail or Gmail, your audience might be 99% Outlook users, and that’s a whole different set of workarounds and designs your team should optimize for. You don’t know until you run the data.
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Strategy = goals + measurement
“You can run an effective email strategy that never makes a single ask of the customer, if you’re able to measure on the back end how the customer responds,” says Price. “That could be engagement, visits, or conversions as you work your way down the funnel.”
The top goals most email marketers have are to grow sales and revenue, convert more subscribers to customers, improve brand engagement, and generate MQLs. Any email campaigns you send should fall into one or two of these key priorities.
Then you can drill down at the campaign level with different goals depending on the type of email you send. For example, use click-through rate to measure engagement with your email newsletter and email marketing ROI to prove the power of your promotional messages. Your email marketing strategy needs to list out the email marketing KPIs you’ll track so you know what to measure—and which of those KPIs matter the most to you in order.
Right now, most marketers focus on bottom-of-funnel metrics like click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate (CR), and revenue per email (RPE). Other common email marketing metrics include:
- Return on investment (ROI)
- Revenue per subscriber
- Subscriber lifetime value (LTV)
- Open rate
- Bounce rate
- Unsubscribe rate
- Deliverability
These metrics should match your overall goals. Rank these metrics based on what growth lever you’d like to pull—and then plan your email campaigns or operational changes based on what you hope to achieve. If you’re trying to fix your deliverability, for example, then setting goals on revenue doesn’t make sense. You need to work on your infrastructure and sender reputation first.
Price recommends starting with what you offer your subscribers, instead of the other way around. “If you’re not delivering some level of value to the person on the recipient end of that email, then you’re not going to meet your goals,” says Price. “You have to connect with the customer, whether it’s with a discount, smart content, or emails that help them do what they want to do faster, better, and easier.”
The modern email marketer’s cross-functional strategy
Email marketers don’t work alone. For email marketing to actually work, you need to bring in other team members. Don’t let those requests throw off your game. Instead, make cross-functional email campaigns a key part of your strategy:
Email marketing + product
New product, new email. You need a playbook for new features and getting your customers more embedded into your existing portfolio.
“It has to start at the beginning with product. Why are they building what they’re building?” says Price. “You need to know how it’s going to make your customer’s lives easier, not just that it’s new and exciting. You need to connect it back to the outcome that the user is trying to drive with your product and make sure you’ve got the positioning right that’s not just, ‘Look at this new thing we made.’”
Your segmentation can be driven by product interest, too. In retail, for example, you can see by purchase behavior or browsing behavior what someone is interested in—so send them more from that category or color, instead of new arrivals. You wouldn’t send a dog owner your special aquarium collection, right? Because what may be a big deal to one part of your audience could be meh to whatever for the rest. Make sure you know that ahead of time and set expectations with the team accordingly.
Price says, “I’ve worked with many a product leader who wants to make a lot of noise about a feature coming out, and they expect a giant marketing campaign. But before you put together multiple emails, you have to know what the value is for your audience, and whether or not your whole audience needs to know or not. It’s okay to push back based on what’s going to perform well.”
Email marketing + support
For your existing customer marketing, working in tandem with your support team can help decrease inquiries and build stronger relationships with your customers. Give them a heads up when you’re going to send out a big email, for example, especially one that’s about a new product, pricing tier, promotion, or package.
They’re also a great place to mine for email content ideas or to understand the customer better. Work with them as you build out onboarding sequences or retention nurture flows to deepen customer engagement in the product. They’re going to know exactly where someone gets stuck and what information a customer needs at each part of the customer lifecycle.
Email marketing + sales
Sales has a reputation for going rogue with emails. It’s why you need to work with sales leadership to make sure their cold email strategy dovetails with your email marketing one so your prospects don’t get too many emails all at once.
“Sales needs to understand what marketing’s job is and that value equation, so you’re not asking too much at the same time in every email campaign,” says Price. “Instead, work with them so that they’re teaching the prospect something valuable, which can still be product-related, but isn’t going to turn them off.”
Teaching reps to build sequences of emails that give information at a slower pace can help alleviate this issue. It can also help you execute more personalized or ABM plays without needing to be managing multiple CRMs. But that comes from leadership, first, since sales reps are often rewarded for the quantity of calls or emails they make.
“Sales understandably doesn’t have the patience to wait to make the direct ask, but the give-and-get equation of content exchange really works. Building sales emails into your overall strategy allows you to get the full scope of that equation so you’re building trust and eventually getting that yes to the demo,” says Price.
Emerging and evolving trends in email marketing strategy
The core tenet of email marketing hasn’t changed—deliver great emails that your audience wants to read.
That’s it. That’s the trend.
“Volume across the board is at an all-time high, and it’s expected to keep growing,” says Price. “The secret is out that email marketing works, and now it’s both a challenge and an opportunity for anyone in email marketing to break through the noise of a very crowded inbox.”
How marketers approach this challenge, though, is changing:
1. Personalization is so much more than <first name> in the subject line
We’ve talked about segmentation as the bedrock of your email marketing strategy, and with it comes personalization. Even though it takes more work to send different versions of an email campaign, you get so much more in return.
25% of email marketers we talked to said that personalization was their most effective email marketing tactic. But when you drill down further into what personalization looks like, the majority of marketers still use basic <first name> merge tags. That’s a huge missed opportunity to try out dynamic content or live content like polls, interactive elements, countdown timers, or product recommendation engines.
“A lot of what inboxes are crowded with are people phoning it in,” sighs Price. “If you’re using AI just to send more emails without thinking about the subscriber on the other side, you’re not going to do well. It needs to be specific, targeted emails that are truly valuable. Personalization is the most effective way to get better results.”
That doesn’t mean personalizing every single email send, but rather looking at the entire email marketing ecosystem to determine where people care about your products slightly differently, like industry, persona, or tech stack. “There are 10,000 different ways you can personalize an email, but only you know your audience well enough to know what’s going to resonate with them,” says Price.
2. Triggered nurture flows > one-off blasts
Part of how this works at scale is by automating behavioral-based emails so you’re delivering personalization at the right time without necessarily sending a million emails yourself.
Email automation sends the right message at the right time to subscribers, and email marketers lean on these automations in their strategy. Subscriber re-engagement campaigns, customer winback, and customer birthdays are among the other automated emails marketers love.
Think of it like a ladder. The most opened email, on average, is the very first one someone receives. What’s the next best action after that? And the next? It’s a series of nudges you make to get them moving forward through the funnel.
“Using the technology you have on the back end to pay attention to what your customer is doing, and figuring out where you add value at each point in the funnel, that’s critical,” says Price. “If they just set up an integration for the product, for instance, that’s when you should send an email of how to make the most of that integration with next steps. It’s so much more effective to respond when they take action.”
We often think of personalization as writing a draft of an email and changing one or two words, but it’s much bigger than that. You have to meet them where they’re at.
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3. An explosion of AI-powered automation
Of course, everyone’s talking about how artificial intelligence is changing everything about email marketing. Most marketers plan to use AI to augment human work—70% say that up to half of their email marketing operations will be AI-driven by the end of 2026, while another 18% predict that 50-75% of their email marketing will be AI-driven.
While we’re just as excited as everyone else about how AI can help make email marketers more productive and data-driven, we’re pretty cautious on using AI as a replacement for your strategy.
Think of AI as an extension of the automation you’ve already come to rely on as an email marketer with a million items on your to-do list. Whether you use AI or not, a great email marketing campaign still needs to have:
- A compelling and engaging design that aligns with your brand experience.
- Valuable content that a subscriber or customer can use or benefit from.
- Clear insights on the back end to help you measure what’s working.
Where it can really help if you get stuck with email marketing strategy is by asking AI to take on the role of “email marketing expert.” Have it suggest campaign ideas based on your first-party data, drip campaign, or email sequences based on your product, or ask it for special offers ideas to sell more products.
Remember, everyone else has access to this tool, too, so make sure to evaluate any recommendations based on your unique market positioning and audience preferences.
4. A more efficient modular email production process
80% of teams who use modular email designs take two weeks or less to create a single email. We’re seeing more and more teams use modular email coding practices to get their emails out the door, with teams relying on templates instead of doing everything one-off. Your email marketing strategy should also include the “how” part of email—who designs, writes, codes, and deploys each send.
Only 28% of companies report using a centralized design template system to maintain brand consistency across email types. Of the companies that do use templates:
- 55% update them at a regular cadence.
- 15% update them after major campaigns.
- 30% have no set frequency for refreshing these designs.
Creating a library of code snippets and an email style guide sets standards for the visual appearance of your emails so that every message you send is consistent with your branding. Your email style guide should include details like:
- Text considerations such as subject line copy and tone.
- Image guidelines like size and style.
- Call-to-action references like code snippets for your go-to bulletproof buttons.
- Frequently used content including email headers, disclaimers, and icons.
- Personalized and dynamic content rules.
- Templates and modules.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you want to send an email. If you want your team to move faster so you can execute your strategy more effectively, then you’ll need to optimize every part of the email production workflow.
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Successful B2B and B2C email marketing campaigns at every stage of the funnel
When building your email marketing strategy, it’s all about understanding what trigger points matter. Here are some great examples of emails at multiple stages of the funnel:
Top of funnel: welcome emails and newsletters
The top of the funnel is all about introducing who you are and what you do. Lead with value and personality so subscribers can get to know your emails and why they should always open them.
This sunny welcome email does a great job of rolling out the welcome mat:
Patagonia is a retailer, but this email doesn’t mention their products at all. Instead, they’re leaning hard into interesting audio-based content for their outdoorsy audience:
Top of funnel doesn’t mean avoiding the product altogether. This example from Miro does a great job of showing what’s new in a newsletter-style format:
Middle of funnel: Educational content
As subscribers deepen their relationship with you, it’s all about engagement. What information is going to get them to click? What do they want to know? What’s going to make them excited to get your emails?
This kind of email does a great job at a lighter sell. It’s new arrivals, but wrapped in a fun design:
This may be a product drop, but it’s wrapped in information about how to do your job more effectively:
Make it as easy as possible for your prospects and customers to engage with you:
And this email goes more on “how-to” style content, rather than just talking about the product:
Bottom of funnel: Case studies, product launches, and customer appreciation
When it’s time to sell, don’t shy away from it. Whether you’re doing discounts or using social proof to show prospects exactly why you’re awesome, be loud and proud about it.
This email has that humble-brag thing going for it:
A classic product launch with a really fresh design:
Always here for puns, especially those that express customer appreciation:
The tools that bring your email marketing strategy to life
| Strategic Area | Key Questions | Tools List |
|---|---|---|
| Segmentation | Who will receive this email? What are our goals for its performance? | ESPs like Salesforce, MailChimp, Klaviyo, and Campaign Monitor |
| Personalization | Can we add more engaging elements to the email? | Litmus Personalize, behavioral analytics tools like Customer.io |
| Automation and AI | What next step does our audience need to take? | ESP and Litmus Assistant |
| Testing and Optimization | How does the email appear in every device and email client? | Litmus Test, Litmus Guardian |
| KPI Analysis | How did the email perform against our goals? | Litmus Analytics |
Bring your strategy to life with Litmus
You can invest hours and hours into a meticulous email marketing strategy, but you won’t know how it works until you get it into inboxes! Efficient building, previews, and testing with Litmus make it easier to bring your email ideas to life, and analytics show you what subscribers think.
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Kayla Voigt is a B2B Freelance Writer.
