Most businesses are sitting on one of their most valuable marketing assets: their email database.
But having a database of hundreds or thousands of contacts doesn’t automatically mean you’re doing email marketing well.
If the only emails you’re sending are occasional promotions or monthly newsletters, you’re likely missing opportunities to nurture customers, build relationships and generate sales.
The real opportunity is to think beyond individual emails and start thinking about the customer journey.
Email marketing is more than sending a newsletter. A well-planned email strategy takes your customers on a journey — from discovering your brand to becoming a customer, and eventually coming back for more.
What is an email customer journey?
An email customer journey is a series of communications designed to respond to where someone is in their relationship with your business.
Someone who has just discovered your brand shouldn’t receive the same email as someone who has purchased from you three times.
Likewise, someone who has abandoned their shopping cart needs a different message from someone who hasn’t purchased from you in 12 months.
Instead of sending the same message to everyone, an effective email strategy delivers the right message, to the right person, at the right stage of their journey.
A typical customer journey might look something like:
Discover → Consider → Purchase → Experience → Repeat → Advocate
And email can play an important role at every stage.
So, what should your email strategy include?
At Online Buzz, I look at email as part of the bigger customer journey — not as a standalone marketing channel.
A strong email strategy can combine:
✉️ Campaigns
Your regular promotional, educational and content emails.
🔄 Automated journeys
Emails triggered by customer behaviour, such as signing up, browsing, purchasing or becoming inactive.
🎯 Segmentation
Different messages for different customer groups based on interests, behaviour and lifecycle stage.
🧠 Content strategy
A balance of promotional, educational and relationship-building content.
📊 Optimisation
Looking at what customers are actually doing and continually improving your emails based on the data.
Your database is more than a list of email addresses
The biggest shift businesses can make is to stop thinking of their email database as a list and start thinking of it as a collection of customer relationships.
Ready to make more of your email database?
Online Buzz can help you build an email strategy that turns your database into a customer journey from first touchpoint through to conversion and repeat purchase.
From email strategy and content planning to automated customer journeys and campaigns, we can help you create an email program that works harder for your business.
Let’s make your emails do more.