The Ultimate Guide to Creating a High-Impact Email Marketing Strategy

When it comes to modern customer engagement, email marketing is often a key part of the equation, providing brands with a powerful way to reach, engage, and convert audiences. Email marketing is one of the original forms of digital marketing, used by marketers for a wide range of needs—from conveying key updates and making community announcements to sending offers and sharing proof of purchase.

Known for its strong ROI, this channel remains incredibly popular worldwide. In 2023, there were 4.37 billion email users worldwide, and that number is projected to grow to 4.89 billion by 2027.

So, how can a business make the most of their email marketing program? In this article, we’ll discuss why an email strategy is important, how to ensure that strategy succeeds over time, and how you can measure its effectiveness. We’ll also showcase examples of strategic campaigns that delivered big results.

Table of Contents

• What is an email marketing strategy?
• Why is having an email marketing strategy important?
• What’s the difference between an email marketing strategy and a customer engagement strategy?
• 5 metrics to track as part of your email marketing strategy
• 7 AI tools to improve your email marketing strategy
• 2 examples of customers successfully leveraging an email marketing strategy
• Finding the right technology to support an email marketing strategy
• Final thoughts
• Email marketing strategy FAQs
• Email marketing strategy resources

What’s an email marketing strategy?

An email marketing strategy is a plan that helps marketers reach their desired audience effectively via—you guessed it—email. It sets out, in detail, what emails to send, how many, to whom, and when. Creating a thoughtful email marketing strategy helps a business get results in the most effective and efficient way possible.

The strategic planning process usually entails:

1. Setting goals and deciding how to measure them

Having well-defined goals—and identifying associated key performance indicators (KPIs)—makes it easy to see if your campaign (or overall email program) is effective. It’s the best way to get to know your audience, find out what does and doesn’t work, and strengthen your strategy.

Goals also align teams with broader business needs, guaranteeing there are common, shared objectives across the company.

2. Researching your target audience

Understanding your audience personas makes it more likely that consumers connect with your brand. Each persona is likely to have different needs or interests. The more you segment emails to different groups of customers, the better insights you’ll be able to gather on what different sections of your audience care about and respond to.

3. Reviewing first-party data

Identifying patterns or trends in your customer data allows for more precise targeting, positioning, and more personalized emails. It’s great if you have technology that helps you do this, but even if you don’t, reviewing any available internal data may lead to helpful insights. For example, if you have sales data that indicates that a certain customer type buys product X around Y timeframe, you can leverage that knowledge to send more relevant emails in the future.

Data could also include: In-app behavior, pages viewed, products purchased, data from customer surveys, data from customer feedback, and data from a loyalty program.

4. Segmentation

A personalization tool, or better yet, a customer engagement platform (CEP), can help you segment your audience and deliver more targeted, personalized messaging.

A CEP can help you answer questions like: Do some audience members engage more often in the morning? Do some completely ignore all sales messages? Would it help to feed certain offers to certain people in a particular location? These insights can fuel more targeted segments and support email campaigns that are particularly relevant and valuable for their recipients.

5. Integrating emails into a marketing calendar

Adding your email plan into your marketing calendar means you can plan, distribute, and track sends with better accuracy. Your business might have coordinated themes and campaigns where all the messaging aligns, allowing you to see how customers engage with the program at any point. It’s also important to be aware of national holidays, awareness days, and major events. Some of these dates provide opportunities for targeted campaigns (e.g. sending a little customer love promotion on Valentine’s Day), while others may be worth avoiding for cultural sensitivities and to prevent your brand from appearing unempathetic.

Note: This only applies to time-based/scheduled emails, which are pre-planned and sent according to a calendar. Many modern email programs are built around action-based emails, which are automatically sent in response to customer actions and updates on the brand side (e.g. a product price drop).

6. Designing and crafting your emails

Designing and crafting great emails is imperative in order to entice recipients to open them and take action. Writing powerful subject lines, choosing how images are positioned, using color, and the right tone of voice all helps uplevel your messages, leading to more brand awareness and loyalty. Technology can also help you test these elements to learn what’s working best with your customers.

Why are email marketing strategies important?

There are many benefits to having an email marketing strategy. Aside from taking the guesswork out of what to send and when, email more broadly offers a way to help reach your marketing goals and build deeper customer relationships at the same time. Emails don’t have to be transactional; ultimately, email is a tool to connect with your audience. Tactics like triggered messages, real-time segmentation, and message personalization can strengthen that customer-brand bond and help you earn a place in a consumer’s heart and mind.

Email strategies are advantageous because they make it easier for you to:

Create personalized content

No one wants to read an email that sounds like it was sent to everyone on earth. Instead, personalizing your outreach can be as simple as addressing a person by their first name. That said, the more data you have on your audience, the more you can personalize your emails. By creating content that speaks directly to them, your customers will feel more connected to your brand.

Send your audience down the right path

Whether your brand has a physical location or is entirely online, getting people to engage and shop where you want them to is often tricky. A good email strategy can tactically direct your audience down the right path. For example, you can use email to highlight a particular store to customers that live nearby. Or, you can focus on a specific product or service. Emails can generate traffic to specific destinations and, even better, to the right products. The more precise you can be, the easier you’ll make it for customers to take desired actions.

Be cost effective

Email marketing typically has a high return on investment (ROI). This makes it the perfect option for businesses that need to make a significant impact with their marketing budget. Although it varies by industry, the average ROI for email marketing is 42:1. In addition, retail, ecommerce, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies tend to see even higher returns.

Improve retention

Improving loyalty and retention is imperative for any business. Whatever customers do, you always want them to come back. Email is a powerful means of cultivating loyalty and reducing churn by adding value, even when customers aren’t making purchases. Whether it’s offering discounts, rewards programs, early access to sales, important information, or even just something fun that makes them laugh, continually providing value for customers builds loyalty and also turns some customers into brand advocates who help to organically increase brand awareness.

Drive awareness and discovery

Promoting your brand to new people comes with its own set of challenges. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, and you’re messaging people who don’t want to hear from you, you risk driving future customers away. It’s better to begin with a vetted email list of people who already expressed interest in hearing from your brand. So, whether it’s new features, products or services, or the latest deals, your success rate will usually be higher with a healthy email list.

Save time

When it comes to email, automation is a huge time-saver. Your email marketing strategy should include creating workflows that encourage subscribers to take specific actions, allowing you to plan strategic messaging sequences in advance that are responsive to whether a subscriber takes an action, triggering the next email in the sequence. For example, if a subscriber registers for an event, the follow-up email might say thank you and include more information about the event. But if the subscriber does not register for the event, the next email they receive might be a second reminder to register. Once these email flows are set up and optimized, they send in the background, freeing up some time and focus you can bring to other areas of your marketing plan.

Get timely results

Email is a marketing method that can drive quick results. Your email strategy can help support other marketing initiatives, and can also act as a standalone method to help drive revenue. That’s because email messages reach recipients swiftly, allowing you to nudge customers to take high-value actions, like making a purchase. Additionally, emails are easy to track and provide actionable insights, too.

Stay consistent across channels

Email is likely just one component of your marketing plan. However, with a clear, thoughtful strategy, you can align with other channels so messaging is comprehensive and consistent across all communication channels. The aim is to provide a highly relevant, seamless experience for customers. To do so, it’s important to focus on breaking down the silos within your business so that multi-channel approaches can deliver maximum results.

Control your data

The further away you can get from relying on third-party data, the better. Instead, use email as a way to gather first-party data. When you find out more about potential new customers, you can use that data to make better marketing decisions. But, before you’re there, you need to become more data independent. First-party data illuminates how customers engage with your brand. Collected directly from users and with their express consent, this data type can generally be leveraged in compliance with privacy laws. The best part? You respect your customers without sacrificing the efficacy of personalization and relevance.

By comparison, third-party data is often collected by outside parties and sold to brands, usually without the user’s knowledge or consent (and often in conflict with privacy legislation).

Outline clear success criteria

A well-designed email marketing strategy can reduce uncertainty, help you plan what messages say, and help determine your success criteria. Consider what metrics you’ll routinely track and set a baseline. With a test-and-learn approach, you can continually review, adjust, and improve campaigns based on real-time data.

See the full benefit of your marketing stack

To gather actionable data, build campaigns, and iterate on relevant insights, you need access to best-in-class tools. Customer engagement platforms like Braze allow you to maintain all of your email data within the platform—or to stream it directly to your data warehouse. Having a centralized bank of data in place allows you to use AI to help predict what customers will do (and need) next, enabling you to truly optimize your campaigns.

Increase revenue

Emails drive customers towards purchases in direct ways (offering deals) and less direct ways (rewards programs, surveys, etc.). Even order confirmation and subscription confirmation emails can build better relationships between you and your customers, ultimately creating lifetime value (LTV), especially during seasonal events and product launches.

What’s the difference between an email marketing strategy and a customer engagement strategy?

An email marketing strategy focuses purely on email. A customer engagement strategy, on the other hand, looks at all the channels and platforms a brand and audience might engage on.

While it’s important to have an email marketing strategy, it’s equally important to have a holistic customer engagement strategy that works across all channels. That might include email, social media, WhatsApp, or any others where your audience lives. Each channel should have its own strategy to address the specific challenges and opportunities that are unique to that channel, with an eye toward providing a seamless, coordinated experience for each user, regardless of where they engage.

5 metrics to track as part of your email marketing strategy

Assessing the impact of your email marketing campaigns means paying attention to the metrics that mark long-term success. Here are five key metrics to watch:

1. Non-open rates

The email open rate isn’t as significant as it once was, thanks to Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) feature that launched in 2021. This feature inflates the number of email opens, making it hard for marketers to trust the metric. Instead, look at the number of people who didn’t open your email. The non-open rate indicates the comparative reach of different email campaigns and a guide for a deeper understanding of what your audience does and doesn’t respond to.

2. Click rates

For a high-level look at channel performance, click rates show you when email recipients take action by clicking a link within the email they receive. This metric isn’t inflated by MPP and can be used to measure the engagement level each email gets. There will be some natural variation. A newsletter with strong CTAs will likely have a higher click rate than a transactional email, so be careful not to rule out certain email types if they didn't drive many clicks—that may not have been the intention, anyway.

Quick note: Marketers are seeing a rise in bot clicks. Read more about the problem and what to do about it.

3. Bounce rates

Emails that don’t reach intended recipients are worth noting. These hard bounces are usually associated with nonexistent email addresses. If you’re finding high hard bounce rates, it’s time to consider your email hygiene.

Soft bounces are temporary problems, often denoting full inboxes or emails that are simply too big. Soft bounces aren’t as concerning, but they do provide useful hints at why certain message types might not get through.

4. Complaint rates

There are multiple ways someone can register their disinterest in your emails. Most brands allow customers to opt out of certain types of email or unsubscribe altogether. Despite this, many people just mark email as spam, which is, in effect, an email complaint. This prevents messages from getting to an individual, and it can damage your overall email reputation, causing even highly engaged customers to see fewer of your messages. For this reason, monitoring your complaint rate is crucial for the overall health of your email program.

5. Conversion rates

Each email should have a conversion goal. Why are you sending it? What action do you want users to take? Conversion rates show the percentage of email recipients who take the action you want. Tracking this metric helps you see if your emails are supporting the overall goals of your email and customer engagement strategy. If a conversion rate is low, you should review and adjust your future emails to be more effective.

7 AI tools to improve your email marketing strategy

Have an email marketing strategy in place but looking to take it up a notch? Here Have an email marketing strategy in place but looking for ways to up your email engagement? Here are some tools that can help:

1. AI Copywriting Assistant

The Braze AI Copywriting Assistant is a natural language generation tool, powered by ChatGPT. This tool makes it easy to spin up copy for subject lines, CTAs, and even entire content blocks. Plus, with AI Copywriting Assistant's “tone control” feature, you can ensure emails match your brand voice.

2. AI Image Generator

The Braze AI Image Generator, built on OpenAI’s DALL•E 2, helps marketers move from ideation to action without relying on (or waiting for) overburdened creative teams.

3. AI Content QA

Checking for grammatical errors or inappropriate content is easy with the Braze platform’s AI Content QA tool. By automating the proofing process, you unlock bandwidth for your team so they can focus on more important, strategic tasks.

4. AI Item Recommendations

The Braze AI Item Recommendations feature allows brands to surface relevant content, products, or services to every customer—at scale. Plug intelligent recommendations into emails with ease to help customers get more value from your brand.

5. Personalized Variant

Braze Personalized Variant allows marketers to adjust email message variants customers receive based on their unique behaviors, preferences, and attributes. This feature supports more relevant, customized experiences, reinforcing engagement and conversions.

6. Personalized Paths

Personalized Paths help facilitate true personalization at scale. This feature automates journeys to serve each customer the copy, creative, channel, offer, etc. that they’re most likely to engage with at each stage of a journey. All it takes is a simple toggle.

7. Intelligent Timing

Braze Intelligent Timing helps send customers messages precisely when they want to hear from you. So, if a given customer is active in the morning or prefers to engage at night, be confident they’re getting your email when they’re most likely to see it, read it, and take action.

8. Messaging Template Assistant

Braze Messaging Template Assistant is a responsive chat tool that empowers marketers to automatically generate on-brand message templates for various channels, starting with email. This intuitive assistant simplifies the template creation process by incorporating brand guidelines and global style settings, ensuring that every message aligns with your brand voice.

Note: This product is currently in beta testing.

2 examples of customers successfully leveraging an email marketing strategy

So what does a successful email marketing strategy look like? Here are a couple real-world examples:

How BlaBlaCar used smart testing to boost open rates by 24%

Problem

French carpool brand BlaBlaCar wanted to reach customers as effectively as possible by email and also maximize email open rates.

Strategy

BlaBlaCar created a marketing hypothesis they wanted to test. They figured email recipients were more likely to open messages that were sent from a real person’s name. BlaBlaCar also hypothesized that certain sender names would perform better than others in different countries.

They decided to use Braze Canvas to automate and simplify the process of testing their hypotheses. With Canvas, BlaBlaCar visualized the customer journey, making it easier to conceptualize campaigns. From then on, they seamlessly coordinated targeted, personalized messages across all channels. Over the next two months, the Braze platform made it possible to build testing flows during several rounds of experimentation in two important markets: France and Russia.

Results

The numbers proved that both hypotheses were correct. BlaBlaCar found that using first names for their email senders resulted in 20%+ higher open rates, compared to emails sent from their brand name. They also found gender and name popularity impacted open rates, with a common masculine name proving to be most appealing in both Russia and France.

How Canva used Braze Catalogs to personalize messages and drive feature adoption

Problem

Canva wanted to update its feature adoption communication flows. Their goal was to serve customers more relevant features that supported better, stickier design experiences. Additionally, Canva wanted to create an overall structure that was quick and easy to update, providing flexibility for future feature launches.

Strategy

Using both Braze Canvas and Braze Catalogs, Canva created 650+ unique campaigns that surfaced 75+ product features, each personalized to individual users, en masse.

Results

Canva increased open rates by 55% and clicks by 47%. They also increased feature adoption by up to 8%, which later boosted user retention and revenue. All in all, Canva increased operational efficiency, saving ~1,000 hours of production time, while relying on Braze to help optimize messaging for 75+ features with 200+ variants.

Finding the right technology to support an email marketing strategy

When it comes to finding a customer engagement platform like Braze to help with email engagement, what exactly should you be looking for?

1. Data agility and customer journey orchestration

Data agility means ensuring that your brand can consistently access the data they need, when and where they need it. It's essential to consolidate data from multiple sources into one platform, enabling you to act on it regardless of its origin. And to do that, you need to make sure that the different technologies that make up your marketing tech stack are able to communicate seamlessly with each other to unify various pieces of customer data into a single, cohesive view. Look for a solution that allows you to unify first-party data through direct integrations with your data warehouse, digital properties, and backend systems in real time. This allows you to activate your data immediately, gaining a comprehensive understanding of your customers' evolving behaviors and preferences.

Orchestration refers to the way that marketers are able to create, manage, and optimize multi-part experiences and messaging flows. Tools like Braze Canvas make it possible for marketers to consistently deliver meaningful, real-time customer-centric campaigns across a wide range of different channels and journey steps, and to do it in a coordinated cohesive way. For email marketers, having the right orchestration tool can make it possible to create rich, responsive email flows that fit each customers’ behavior and preferences.

2. A/B testing and message optimization

Understanding what drives your business—what works, what doesn’t, and when to scale—becomes clearer through testing and optimization. Platforms that facilitate continuous testing, review, and adjustment empower you to make impactful, data-driven decisions that keep you ahead of the competition. Utilize intuitive segmentation and message editors to bring your creative ideas to life quickly, experimenting with AI-powered optimizations to discover winning strategies that benefit both your customers and your brand.

3. Dynamic segmentation and real-time analytics

Tracking and coordinating email insights can enhance the customer experience, positively impacting relationships and your bottom line. However, audience behaviors and preferences are constantly changing, presenting a moving target for marketers. With dynamic segmentation and real-time analytics that adapt based on subscriber behavior, brands can develop timely insights and provide personalized experiences for each user.

4. Fast value with tools and templates for every level of sophistication

It’s important you can start quickly with built-in best practices and pre-built templates that enhance your customer engagement expertise. Whether you’re a marketer or part of a technical team, Braze offers a range of options, from 140+ pre-built partner integrations to no-code analysis features, allowing your data to work effectively for your setup.

Final thoughts

Don’t underestimate the power of email marketing. It’s the backbone of modern customer engagement and delivers results both in the moment and over time.

Email as a channel is here to stay, and its best-in-class effectiveness is easily enhanced with AI. As you embrace this technology and use AI to help establish familiarity with customers—without being overly intrusive—always remember to humanize your interactions, too. Consumers want experiences from the brands they patronize that feel like a conversation with a trusted advisor, not a jargon-filled blast from a machine.

There are so many benefits that can come from email marketing. And with the right approach and the right tools, it’s possible to take your email program to the next level and build stronger relationships with your customers. (Not sure where to start? Try Braze.)

What’s an email marketing strategy?

An email marketing strategy is a plan that marketers follow to achieve desired goals from email campaigns.

What are the 4 types of email marketing campaigns?

In general, there are 4 types of email marketing campaigns you’ll come across: 

• Transactional emails are triggered by customer actions and used to provide information about specific transactions (e.g., a purchase confirmation).
• Promotional emails encourage subscribers to make purchases or sign up for subscriptions. They may include discounts or special deals.
• Email newsletters are used for important announcements, news or trends, new products or services, or events. They usually drive traffic to a website.
• Retention emails foster trust and loyalty. They keep customers engaged with your brand. Even “Thank you” or feedback emails are commonly used for retention.

What’s the best way to build an email strategy?

To build an effective email strategy, follow the important steps outlined in this article:

1. Set goals and decide how to measure them.

2. Research your target.

3. Review internal data (if you have it).

4. Segment your audience.

5. Integrate email sends into your marketing calendar.

6. Design and craft your emails.

Is email marketing successful?

Success depends on the industry and how well your email strategy is executed. That said, email remains one of the most effective marketing channels, boasting an ROI as high as 42:1.

What’s the first step in developing an email marketing strategy?

The first step is simple: Set your goals. Be clear about what you want a campaign to achieve for your business. This will help you through the process and inform important decisions along the way.

What is the 50-50 rule in email marketing?

The 50-50 rule in email marketing suggests that 50% of your email content should focus on providing value to your audience, such as informative or entertaining content, while the other 50% can promote your products or services. This balance helps maintain engagement and fosters a positive relationship with subscribers.

How much can you get back for every $1 you put into email marketing?

On average, businesses can expect to earn about $36 for every $1 spent on email marketing, making it one of the most cost-effective marketing channels available. This impressive return on investment highlights the effectiveness of targeted and well-executed email campaigns.

How many emails should you send for email marketing?

The optimal number of emails to send for marketing varies by audience and industry. It's essential to monitor engagement metrics and adjust frequency based on audience preferences and responses.

Featured email marketing strategy resources

• Made You Look: Powering Smart Email Marketing
• The Braze Email Inspiration Guide
• Email Marketing: The Messaging Metrics That Matter
• Email Must-Knows: Email List Cleansing
• Braze Email Marketing