The Basic Plan/Outline For Email Marketing In Food & Beverage
Posted By Peyton Fox | October 20th, 2023
Do you have a food and beverage brand and need help figuring out where to start regarding email marketing? You have come to the right place!
There are a few strategies and techniques to be aware of when beginning your food and beverages email marketing journey. You might be wondering why email marketing is so important. For food and beverage brands, email marketing remains one of the most influential ways businesses can connect with their audience.
When done right, email marketing can encourage brand loyalty, boost sales, and create lasting customer relationships.
This blog will help guide you through a basic plan for your brand to kickstart its email marketing adventure.
Find Target Audience
The meat and potatoes of effective email marketing is understanding your audience. Dig a little deeper and think beyond basic information such as the customer’s age and gender- consider your customers’ lifestyles, preferences, and circumstances and why your brand is needed in their lives.
Choices are as varied as those making them. In the food and beverage industry, understanding your target audience is crucial.
If your brand specializes in providing customers with gourmet experiences, consider the age, lifestyle, and overall demographic of individuals interested in your products. For example, your target audience might be an entrepreneur between their 30s and 60s with a highly disposable income and a taste for lavish things.
These customers might view food as an art form and look to a brand that provides high-quality and visually appealing products. Knowing this, you’d want to cater your email marketing to reflect this by adding tone, look, and content that would appeal to this particular demographic.
A food e-commerce brand that specializes in meal delivery kits would want to market to college students or busy families with children and include plans that can be quick, healthy, and affordable. These individuals will likely prefer quick and easy solutions to their meals through apps or delivery services.
Craft your brand to reflect the customer’s needs by offering subscription meal services with different price ranges, food options, and quick delivery.
When people think of desserts and sweets, they think of fun and relaxation, and brands should provide a tone and design that is playful and creative to reflect this.
A food brand that markets desserts and sweets can have a wide demographic, from small children to senior citizens, and should consider what product options work best, such as sugar-free cakes and chocolates, healthier alternatives to brick-and-mortar candy, or even exotic sweets from around the globe.
Consider your brand and those you’re trying to cater to.
Think about what sets your food or beverage brand apart from the rest, and use your brand’s unique selling points to help identify specific customers you want to market to.
Defining Your Goals
Before a launch, defining goals and objectives for your brand’s success is important. Clear and well-defined goals provide a sense of direction for your brand and provide a solid foundation when planning email marketing efforts.
Having a clear brand goal and purpose helps your brand stand out amongst the sea of other food and beverage brands, as customers are more likely to buy from a brand that aligns with their goals and values. When you take the time to understand your brand’s goals, it translates to your products and ultimately your customers.
An effective way to define your brand’s goals is using the SMART method. The SMART method is the acronym designed to set well-defined and clear email marketing goals.
- Specific: To really get to the nitty-gritty of your email marketing strategy for your food and beverage brand, you want to be as detailed as possible in your goals. Laying out a specific email marketing plan allows you to track your progress more efficiently and take corrective actions if needed. A goal such as “increase overall online revenue for our food and beverage e-commerce store.” is admirable but a little too broad; instead, narrow down your goal and make it more specific, such as “achieve a 25% increase in monthly online sales by promoting featured products and exclusive discounts through targeted email campaigns.” The more detailed your brand is with its goals, the easier it is to track its progress.
- Measurable: Keep your goals specific and quantifiable. You should be able to collect data and use it to monitor your goals for the best results. Having a vague objective is a start, but it’s hard to continue to track for success. Suppose your goal is to see a decrease in the number of subscribers opting out of our email list. In that case, you can make this a measurable goal by instead saying, “Reduce the email unsubscribe rate by 10% by creating valuable and relevant content and allowing subscribers to customize their email preferences within the next three months.” Adding measurable elements makes tracking the information and data your brand receives easier.
- Achievable: There’s nothing wrong with challenging yourself, but the objectives must be practical and feasible. A broad goal can leave you without structure, making it difficult to see a path to success- make a goal that is within your food and beverages scope. An unachievable goal might look something like “Increase website traffic by 200% in the next month without increasing marketing budget or making any changes to the website.” but if your brand sets a goal with achievable expectations, it can instead look like “Increase online sales by 20% within the next three months by improving website’s look, and launching targeted marketing campaigns to specific customers.”
- Realistic: You want not only achievable goals but also realistic ones. Ensure your goals fit your brand’s mission and align with your target audience. To do this, take time to understand your brand’s focus and what you want out of your target audience. An excellent example of a realistic goal would be to send out two email marketing messages per week- this goal is tangible and can fit into your busy schedule without stretching your time thin. This makes it possible to keep a line of communication with your audience, keeping their attention without overexerting your brand’s time and resources. Setting realistic goals should feel manageable to your brand, which opens the door to making strategic decisions that can lead to growth.
- Timely: Having deadlines can be a fantastic motivator in seeing success for your food and beverage brand. Keep your goals to a specific timeline to help you stay on track and see your progress in reaching them. A goal such as “see an increase in customer satisfaction” needs a time limit to push your brand- instead, give it a time limit such as “See an increase in customer satisfaction in the next six months.”
Why Use SMART Goals?
SMART goals provide a focused direction for the brand to go in. These goals help define exactly what needs to be achieved without leaving any room for ambiguity. Setting goals using the SMART method ensures that email marketing for your food and beverage brand is perfectly outlined and paved for success.
Building Your Email List
The road to success for your food and beverage brand lies in having excellent email marketing strategies that build your email list. With your goals defined, it’s time to start drawing your target audience in and creating repeat customers.
Building an email list is more important for your brand’s success than you might initially think, especially for e-commerce brands where the benefits are abundant. You can create personalized emails and target your customers based on their shopping behavior, a task that’s impossible on social media. In 2022 alone, about 333.2 billion emails were expected to have been sent and received each day, a number as staggering as that, and with a predicted increase by 2025- brands have to find ways to get creative when building an email list.
A great tactic to do this is through pop-up email signups. Pop-ups can trigger when someone is about to leave your website without making a purchase or subscribing; offering an incentive such as a discount code, entry to a giveaway, or free shipping encourages customers to sign up for your newsletter.
Be mindful when creating an email pop-up; you want people not to feel pressured to sign up but instead interested in hearing your brand, when done right- an email pop-up can have you building your email list in no time.
Optimized Email Design
An inconsistent or unoptimized email design can result in missed sales and fewer customers; you want them to be able to consistently recognize your brand amongst the numerous other food and beverage brands.
Ways to accomplish this include email design that is easily viewable on various screen sizes such as tablet and mobile devices, personalization that creates an intimate connection with your customers, interactive elements like buttons and surveys, and consistent copywriting and calls to actions that fit your brand’s overall mission and tone.
Automating Your Campaigns
To get the most out of your email marketing campaigns, use workflows and automation to keep a steady line of communication from your food and beverage brand to the customer, save time, and improve overall efficiency.
Segment your customers based on their characteristics, such as location, preferences, and purchase history; this allows you to separate your customers into groups based on their needs and allow your brand to create content that works to convert them into paying customers. Everyone wants to feel important, and automation is the perfect email marketing tool to do just that.
With customers receiving countless emails daily- without segmentation and personalization, your brand is less likely to get noticed, resulting in unsubscribes, moved to spam, or deleted emails. Segmentation allows your brand to cut through the noise and connect personally with your audience. 74% of online consumers get frustrated when content like offers, ads, and promotions are not aligned with their interests. Without segmentation, you could miss out on increased sales and repeat customers.
Your brand can use automation to send emails to follow up on purchases, ask for reviews, or let customers know they left items in their cart and encourage them to reconsider buying.
This can result in better campaign performance. Sure, you can send all the same emails out to each customer, but the likelihood that they all get opened is low. To truly maximize your email marketing, you want to tailor each email so that each customer feels appreciated and will be more likely not just to open the email but act upon it.
Automation will do the work for you- sending out personalized emails when something is triggered and allowing your brand to focus on other things while still seeing an increase in open rates, click rates, and conversions.
Analyze Results
Good email marketing doesn’t end just because your brand understands its target audience, has set goals, and email automation is up and running. Keeping a vigilant eye on the fruits of your email marketing labor, such as open rate and click rate, helps keep track of your brand’s success and see where any improvements can be made.
For example, a low open rate might indicate a need for more enticing subject lines, and a low click rate could suggest that the content or offers offered are not appealing enough and require some changes.
Regular analysis allows your food and beverage brand to adapt and refine its approach, ensuring that content isn’t just delivered but received and acted upon.
Conclusion
Crafting a successful email marketing campaign for food and beverage brands requires a careful approach. Take the time to understand your target audience, then define clear, SMART goals for the brands to provide a structured path toward continued success. Once you have your brand’s goals down, maintain a recognizable email design to make sure your brand’s messages and content resonate with your audience.
The journey doesn’t end when all those steps are taken; being persistent in monitoring open rates and click rates provides valuable insights on how well your brand engages with the world and allows your brand to adapt and grow as needed.
With these fundamental steps in place, your food and beverage brand can harness the power of email marketing to nurture connections, boost sales, and thrive in the crowded market.
Schedule Your Call
In our meeting together, we will run through your current email marketing setup, the hurdles you are facing, and more. At the end of our call, I’ll be able to detail how my team and I could help.
When booking, you’ll see a few questions that must be answered prior to our call. We are very selective about what brands and clients we work with to ensure we can succeed with your email marketing.
