4 Tips for Building your 2022 Email Marketing Strategy

By Tom Wozniak, Head of Marketing – published on OnlyInfluencers on 11/18/21

As we speed toward the end of the year (seriously, it’s almost Thanksgiving – how did that happen so fast?), email marketers are focused on two key projects.

1 – Ensuring those all-important holiday season campaigns all go out without a hitch.

2 – Finalizing your 2022 email marketing strategies.

While some companies probably put together their initial 2022 marketing strategies in the last few months, others are just getting into the planning stage. Whether you have your plans largely lined up or are still working on the outline for your strategy, I wanted to share a few tips that should help you put together more effective email marketing plans for the new year.

1. Look Back at your 2021 Program

Just about any annual marketing plan (in any channel) should start with a look back at your program from the previous year. So, unless you’re brand new to the email channel, start by evaluating your campaign performance from 2021. What worked and what didn’t? What did you learn from your testing programs?

It’s a good practice to start by assessing what parts of your previous email program should transition to the new year or what areas are in need of a change. You will likely want to look beyond the previous year as well, to identify possible trends in campaign performance that you should prepare for in 2022.

As you look at your past results, particularly those from 2020-2021, it’s also vital to put them into context. Prior to the pandemic, year-over-year changes in email campaign performance may have been a bit more predictable, or at least not overly volatile. But that all changed in early 2020. We saw largely unprecedented shifts in consumer behavior, as quite literally every person’s daily activities were impacted like none of us have ever experienced before.

So, as you evaluate your campaign performance from the past 2 years, it’s important to consider the environment your recipients were living in and how that has also shifted and will continue to shift as we move into 2022. If you saw significant swings in performance over the last ~20 months, take the situation into consideration as you use these results to forecast how campaigns may perform in 2022.