Email marketing is considered one of the most powerful marketing tools in today’s business world. It helps brands create awareness, enhance sales, and subsequently grow business. A perfect tool for building customer relationships, an email marketing campaign is essentially the process of sending targeted emails from a business to its customers/prospects with the aim of engaging with them better.
Building a successful email marketing campaign allows businesses to ensure that they get their customers/recipients to take action, engage with the business, and eventually acquire the benefit of more leads and sales.
Keep reading to know how you can run a successful email marketing campaign in a few simple steps.
The first step in building a successful email marketing campaign is to decide your business goals and what it is that you want to communicate in the email. Besides, it’s also important to align the goals of your email with your brand’s broader marketing goals. Once you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve in the emails, it’ll be much easier to identify your target audience and create successful email campaigns to achieve your desired marketing goals.
Another important thing to ensure here is that the goals of your email are specific, relevant, measurable, and attainable, as it offers a clear framework for your email marketing campaigns. In general, the goals of your email marketing campaign should include welcoming new customers/prospects, promoting your product/content using different marketing materials, vinyl banners, acrylic signs etc., nurturing your existing client base, and sending targeted emails by segmenting your customers.
Once you establish your email marketing goals clearly, the next step in the process is to build an email list. Typically, the email list you create should consist of leads who are interested in what you offer along with the ones whom you can easily convert to subscribers. Some of the simple ways to get email addresses and create an email list include
Promoting your brand’s newsletter on social media platforms
Adding a clear CTA on your business website
Gathering email addresses at the point of sale
Leveraging events to invite people to sign up for an email list
Offering gifts/coupons to customers who choose to sign up either on the website or physical store.
There’s a range of different email types that brands send out to achieve their specific business goals. It’s important to choose one carefully, depending on your goal and target audience. Some of the popular email campaign types that should know about include
Informative emails – These are emails that provide educational information on a specific topic related to your brand, such as product information, rules/ guidelines, and more.
Product update emails – These emails are specifically sent to offer updates on your existing products/ services, model updates, new product launches, and more.
Newsletter email – A newsletter email is typically sent every month and contains a range of topics that interest customers/subscribers and are related to the company’s products/services.
An event invitation email – The purpose of an event invitation email is to raise awareness of your organization’s events and encourage your customers/ subscribers to attend them.
This is yet another important step in building a successful email marketing campaign. Segmentation is essentially the practice of splitting up an entire email list into specific targeted groups based on various metrics, including demographics (age, location, sex), subscribers, interests (marketing, sales), and more.
Once you’re done segmenting your email list, the next step is to work on designing a workflow to fulfill the objective of your overall campaign. At this stage, you also need to work on identifying the triggers (e.g., customers opening the email, clicking/not clicking on a link) that will ensure that the emails which will follow are in a functional sequence.
The content you’re creating and offering to your subscribers plays a key role in defining the success of your email marketing campaign. Even if one of your emails fails to strike a chord with customers despite having a multi-layered email marketing campaign in place, they’ll soon lose interest and might just click on the unsubscribe button.
It’s therefore important to ensure only fresh, updated, and relevant content is sent out in your emails. Also, it makes sense to keep track of which content is performing well so that you’re only sending out emails that your audience is really opening, clicking, and actively engaging with. If the click-through rate of your emails is going down and the email list is quickly turning out to be ineffective, it’s time to rethink and reevaluate your email content strategy.
Lastly, it’s crucial to analyze key email marketing metrics as it’ll allow you to learn more about improving your strategy for future campaigns. Some of the key metrics that you need to measure here include
Open rate – It’s the ratio of the number of people who opened your email against the total number of recipients.
Unsubscribe rate – Unsubscribe rate is essentially the number of people who unsubscribed from your emails against the total number of recipients. A very high unsubscribe rate means that you need to revisit your email frequency and segmentation.
Click-through rate – It’s the ratio of the number of people who clicked on a link in your email against the total number of email recipients.
Bounce rate – Bounce rate is the number of emails that failed to deliver against the total number of emails sent by you.