Email Marketing Strategy: How to Plan & Optimize Your Email Campaigns for Growth

By Roman Kmyta | March 3, 2025

Strategic email campaign planning is essential for business growth. While there’s always room for urgent campaigns—such as product launches, updates, or corrections—having a structured plan ensures long-term success. A well-thought-out email marketing plan helps define goals, target the right audience, and maximize ROI.

In this guide, IMPRO’s team walks you through the entire email marketing process, from initial planning to performance analysis and revenue tracking. Dive in to learn the step-by-step approach to optimizing your email campaigns for success.

Step 1: Develop a Strong Marketing Plan

Before jumping into execution, ensure you have a clear marketing plan that outlines the following:

Your target audience (T.A.) and their needs
Market trends, competition, and industry insights
Clear, measurable SMART goals for email marketing
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to track success

Marketing Strategy & Action Plan

A solid email marketing strategy includes a marketing calendar and a structured approach to content planning. Here’s how to start:

Build a Marketing Calendar

A marketing calendar helps visualize key campaigns throughout the year. Use available resources like:

Klaviyo’s Marketing Campaign Calendar
Holiday and eCommerce event calendars (example)
ChatGPT for niche-specific event recommendations

Once you’ve selected relevant holidays and events, personalize your calendar by:

Prioritizing key sales periods and customer engagement campaigns
Segmenting audiences based on interest and behavior
Maintaining a balance between sales-driven and engagement-focused emailsFor more tips on email marketing strategy, read our related article.

Pro Tip: Bombarding subscribers with sales-only emails can reduce engagement and harm your eCommerce brand in the long run perspective. Maintain a mix of nurturing, educational, and promotional content.

Step 2: Analyze Past Performance & Set Benchmarks

If your business has historical email marketing data, use it to refine your strategy. Ask yourself:

What campaigns performed well last year?
What were the key engagement metrics (open rate, click rate, revenue impact)?
Were there any noticeable trends in engagement based on send time, email content, or audience segments?

Data-Driven Decision Making

Compare year-over-year email performance to spot patterns
Use Google Analytics (GA) & Social Media Insights to measure impact beyond emails
Identify underperforming areas and adjust the strategy accordingly

For new businesses, A/B testing is critical. Consistently collect and analyze data to refine your future campaigns.

Step 3: Understand & Segment Your Audience

Your email marketing efforts must be audience-centric. Consider:

Cultural relevance and traditions of your target audience
Gender, age, and behavioral segmentation
Personalized messaging to increase engagement

If certain holidays or promotions do not resonate with a segment, create customized content to enhance relevance.

For more tips on how to boost sales with email marketing in 2025, read our post.

Step 4: Build a Strategic Email Marketing Plan

Now that you have:
✅ Select a month and holidays for outreach
✅ Insights from past performance
✅ Audience segmentation

It’s time to develop a detailed strategy. For each campaign, be sure to define:

Campaign Goal: Sales, engagement, lead nurturing, etc.
Offer: Discounts, exclusive deals, or content
Start/End Dates: Scheduling based on audience behavior
A/B Testing: Hypothesis and expected outcome
Product Focus: Featured items or category promotions
Additional Assets: Landing pages, pop-ups, creative content
Copywriting & Creative Requirements: Design and tone of messaging
Communication Channels: Email, SMS, Push Notifications, etc.
Action Plan: Task allocation for copywriters, designers, and developersWe know sometimes it’s hard to manage all these crucial steps for one manager or business owner, that’s why we’re offering complex services starting with strategy development and copy production, ending with implementation and analysis for improvements.Please find out more here or request a consultation with our expert.

Step 5: Optimize with Data & Tools

Effective segmentation ensures maximum impact per email sent. Leverage available data, including:

Marketing engagement history (email opens, clicks)
Website activity (visited pages, product views, category views, abandoned carts)
Customer status (new, repeat, VIP)
Purchase history (previous orders product and value, average order value)
Stated preferences (category interests, past interactions)
Geolocation (targeting based on country-specific trends)

Pro tip: there could be even more variations for segments. It all depends on the data you collect. Check your metrics and properties and analyze which could be used or what you need to set up additionally.

Once your segmentation is set, QA (quality assurance) testing is essential. Before sending an email, check:
✅ Template responsiveness (mobile & desktop)
✅ Coupon codes & links functionality
✅ Copy accuracy & personalization
✅ Dark mode & accessibility testing

Step 6: A/B Testing for Continuous Improvement

Testing should have a clear purpose and actionable outcomes. Some key email elements to test:

Subject lines (impact on open rate)
Call-to-action (CTA) button colors & placements
Send times & days (based on audience behavior)
Content formats (text-heavy vs. image-heavy emails)

A/B Testing Best Practices

Test only one variable at a time (e.g., subject line OR CTA placement)
Ensure equal segmentation for accurate comparison
Analyze relevant metrics (open rate for subject lines, click rate for CTA tests, etc.)

Pro Tip: understanding which metric relates to each part of your email campaign is crucial when drawing conclusions.

Case Studies from IMPRO’s Experience:

Case Study 1: Beauty Niche Email Personalization

IMPRO helped a beauty brand segment their email lists based on customer behavior:

Recent buyers (2-6 months ago) responded better to bundled product offers + free mini samples.
New subscribers (never purchased) engaged more with mini-product discounts.

A/B tests confirmed these hypotheses, leading to higher engagement and revenue.

Case Study 2: Apparel Brand Send Time Optimization

A fashion retailer sought to improve email performance with A/B testing of the button color and placement, copy style. IMPRO’s team analyzed past data and found:

Open and click rates exceeded industry benchmarks. That meant that the audience was engaged and used to the brand’s approach, so there was a potential harm to the brand’s positioning using these types of tests.
Instead of testing templates and copy, the team tested send days and times for different categories of contacts.

Adjusting the timing for different segments increased open rates and boosted revenue.

Step 7: Plan for Long-Term Success

To maintain consistent growth, create a strategic email roadmap:

📌 Plan campaigns 3-6 months in advance
📌 Leave room for flexibility & urgent campaigns
📌 Incorporate A/B test findings into future emails
📌 Regularly optimize based on performance insights

By following this structured approach, you ensure that your email marketing strategy is data-driven, audience-focused, and result-oriented.

Conclusion

Successful email marketing requires well-planned strategy, data analysis, personalization, and optimization. By implementing these best practices, your campaigns will drive higher engagement, stronger customer relationships, and increased revenue.

Need expert guidance? IMPRO’s email marketing specialists can help you craft and execute high-converting campaigns tailored to your brand. Contact us today.