‘Strategy’ is one of those terms marketers throw around a lot—but rarely explain.
So if you’re unsure what it means to create an email marketing strategy for your language business, don’t worry. You’re not alone!
The good news is that it’s not that difficult to create. And in this post, I’m explaining exactly what goes into creating an email marketing strategy.
What is an email marketing strategy?
An email marketing strategy is essentially a detailed plan that lays out the steps you will take to reach your goals. It should align with your overarching marketing objectives, helping you decide what content to send, when to send it, and why.
By developing an email marketing strategy, you eliminate guesswork from the content creation process and ensure that every update you send has a clear purpose.
In other words, instead of sending random updates to your list and hoping they translate into sales, you can send timely emails that move subscribers closer to becoming clients or students.
What’s the difference between an email marketing strategy and a content plan?
While your content plan details what goes into each email, your strategy considers the reason why. It acts as a bridge between your wider business and marketing goals and the day-to-day actions you’ll take to achieve them.
By breaking big objectives into smaller steps, a strategy makes creating a content plan easier, less overwhelming and way more effective. That’s why you should always work backwards—from the business strategy to the content plan.
Step 1: Set your goals and objectives
You can’t expect to see results from your emails if you don’t know why you’re sending them. So, before you start planning content, think about how the channel fits within your overall marketing strategy. How it will help you reach your overarching business goals?
Let’s say you want to increase sign ups for your language programmes. While your emails may cover various topics, every single one should be guided by this goal. This will help you decide what type of content you need to send in your newsletters to see tangible results.
For example, increasing sales isn’t just about promoting your offers. You need to warm your subscribers up before they’re ready to buy from you. So, as well as sending sales emails, you may want to send:
- Valuable tips to help your readers solve a problem
- Expert insights to showcase your authority on the topic
- Social proof and case studies to build trust in your service
- Your opinions and values to connect with your readers
By thinking about your big business goals first, you’ll save yourself hours of experimenting and see results much more quickly.
Step 2: Plan what to promote and when
Translating those big business goals and content ideas into a clear action plan can feel overwhelming. But don’t worry about scheduling ideas just yet.
Instead, we’re going to reverse engineer your plan. Start by pulling up a calendar (annual or quarterly) and planning which offers you’re going to promote and when.
For each promotion, think about:
- Who the audience is
- What stage of customer awareness they’re at
- How much information they need to be ready to buy
Use this information to determine when you’ll need to start promoting the course, and add those dates to your calendar. Then, think about what type of content you’ll need to send and when so your audience is ready for your offer.
Remember: not every email needs to sell something, but the content should align with the promotions you have planned.
Step 3: Decide how often to send emails
As a general rule, I recommend sending no less than one email per week. This allows you to stay fresh in your subscribers’ minds and earn trust more quickly.
That said, how often you should send emails totally depends on your business, your audience and your goals.
The best way to decide is to review the plan you made in step two. When you know what you’re promoting and when, you know how much time you have to share all the necessary information for your campaign.
And don’t worry if you decide you need to send multiple emails per week. Plenty of language businesses see great results from sending newsletters twice weekly—sometimes even daily! The key is to pick a frequency and stick to it. Consistently showing up will help you build trust and brand recognition.
At this stage, I’d also consider which email sequences you wish to set up. At the very least, create a welcome email automation to introduce new subscribers to your school or business, share a bit about you and present your courses before they start receiving your regular newsletter.
Step 4: Plan how you’ll grow your list
I’m a firm believer that you don’t need a huge list to see results from email. But growth is a key part of a healthy email marketing strategy.
Because let me be clear: your email strategy will not work if people don’t know how to join your list. It sounds obvious, but you’d be shocked how difficult some language schools make it to subscribe.
Don’t hide your sign up forms in your website footer or force people to contact you to join. Choose a handful of list building strategies (like website pop ups, lead magnets or ads) to consistently bring people into your world.
And talk about the benefits of receiving your emails everywhere, all the time.
Step 5: Decide where you’ll host your list
This is the final step on the list because it’s the easiest decision to make. And I don’t want you to procrastinate over which platform to choose before you’ve figured out the why and the what behind your email marketing strategy.
A quick Google search will reveal that there are countless options to choose from. You’ll also find hundreds of blog posts offering detailed comparisons of different platforms. But I recommend signing up for a few free trials and testing them out yourself.
Make sure to factor a few things into your decision:
- How easy it is to use
- How familiar you are with the tech
- Whether or not you can run email campaigns/sequences
- The platform’s pricing model (many providers charge you more as you grow your list, and you don’t want to be penalised for growing!)
Creating an email marketing strategy doesn’t have to be hard.
At least not when you follow these steps to plan it!
One thing I’ll say before I go is that there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ when it comes to making any of these decisions.
As long as you’re basing your decisions on your wider marketing goals and regularly assessing your results, you’re on the right track.
Happy strategising!
View comments
Leave a comment