Approximately 293 billion business and consumer emails are sent and received per day. If you want to stand out from that crowd, you need to get your email marketing game right.
It greatly depends on how well you draft emails and execute email-campaigns marketing strategies. So here is a full guide that takes you through each step of running your email marketing campaigns.
What is an Email Marketing Campaign?
Simply put, an email marketing campaign is a single email or a series of emails sent from a business to its prospects or customers. It is done to achieve a specific goal which can include customer engagement, lead generation, lead nurturing, traffic generation, etc.
Email marketing campaigns help you stay connected with your customers or prospects at every stage of their customer journey. There are many email marketing free tools available that let you launch email campaigns easily.
Email Campaigns: Marketing Steps
You do not just randomly send emails to your customers. Your emails might get piled up among the tons of emails your customers receive. So, if you need your recipient to open and read your email, you need to do some prep work.
So, here is a step by step guide to launching your email marketing campaign that drives results.
- Build an Email List
- Identify your goal
- Understand Email Types
- Understand your target audience
- Plan your emails and follow-ups
- Craft the subject line
- Write the email copy
- Design your email
- Test and analyze your email
1. Build an Email List
To start your campaign you need to have a wide list of subscribers. Remember that you can only send emails to people who have opted-in to your email list.
To grow your audience you can use opt-in options in your website, newsletter or social media channels. In the subscription form, include fields to collect the necessary information for your mailing list like name, email address, phone number etc.
2. Identify your goal
Understanding what you want to achieve from your campaign is the first step you need to take after you have a list of subscribers. This helps you create valuable content for your recipients.
It can be to:
- Welcome new subscribers to build good customer relationships.
- Promote your product or service with promotional emails with offers or special deals.
- Engage customers/prospects with informational or promotional emails that can be beneficial to them.
- Follow up to always stay in touch with customers.
- Re-engage inactive subscribers.
3. Understand Email Types
When you identify your objective, you can choose different email campaigns that’ll work for your goals. You can look at different examples of email marketing campaigns in this blog for a bit of inspiration.
There are different types of emails- promotional, informational or those intended for a specific purpose.
Here is an email marketing campaign example by Adobe that has included a flash sale offer in the email.
4. Understand your target audience
Creating email content that is highly targeted is one of the most important steps you need to follow. For that, you should understand your audience.
Do good research on your target audience and find out what could be valuable for them. You can get insights about your website visitors from Google Analytics.
If you are using Facebook for lead generation, you can use Facebook Insights to get a deep understanding of your audience.
5. Plan your emails and follow-ups
When your email list is up, it’s time to plan your email campaigns. Your email marketing strategy might not end with a single email. You might require a series of emails to achieve your objectives.
Let’s say, you are planning to engage your audience with informational emails. For that, you will need to take your customer through a journey that ultimately leads to a conversion. That’s where email series is needed.
So, plan your emails accordingly with the aim to reach your goal. You can use email marketing free tools like Mailchimp, Sendpulse etc to automate email marketing customer journeys. If you are looking for an easy, all in one business solution that can help you with both managing your business and email marketing activities, try out Zenys.
6. Craft the subject line
When it comes to the content of your email, it starts with creating catchy subject lines that compel your recipients to open your email. Almost 47% of email recipients decide to open emails based on subject lines.
There are certain ways you can grab the attention of your audience. Some of them are:
- Personalizing your subject lines with the recipient’s name
- Mentioning how your recipients will benefit from the email
- Avoiding spam trigger words
- Being specific
You can check out more subject line ideas in this blog.
7. Write the Email Copy
Once the subject line is ready, you can start writing the copy. Now that you know your target audience, you can create content that will be useful to your recipients.
While writing, make sure that you start with something that hooks your audience to read on. Here are some tips that can help you with creating great content.
- Make it short and clear.
- Personalize your emails to make them more targeted.
- Add a promising value that clearly mentions how it will be useful for your readers.
- Add a strong call to action(CTA) that prompts the readers to take the desired action.
- Provide opt-out options.
If you need help with drafting your email, check out this blog on email marketing templates.
8. Design your email
Your email should look appealing that attract your recipients. To make your emails look beautiful, you can try out email templates using tools for email marketing like Mailchimp. You can choose the one that goes well with your content.
Also, if you are adding images, remember to insert alt tags. This allows people who have disabled images to understand what they are about.
9. Test and analyze your results
Before you hit send, don’t forget to test the email. Make sure you check your email on multiple devices such as mobiles, desktops and tablets and see how it appears.
Once you have tested, you can go ahead and send the emails to your selected email list. An important step to note is to track your emails and analyze the results.
Track your open rates and click rates for your email and see if it is giving you the expected results. This will greatly help you in figuring out what works with email campaigns marketing so that you can create effective email campaigns in the future.
Now that you know how to create email campaigns, check out these great example email campaigns, tips for email marketing and email marketing templates that can help you get better results.