Whether you want to launch a product, raise awareness of your brand, attract new customers or keep current customers up to date, you need a good email campaign. Emails have been around for several decades now and despite being the grandfather of digital communication still offers one of the most effective methods of delivering a message to your current and potential customer base.
Benefits of Email Marketing Campaigns
Emails are a cost effective option. While free to send, if using a third party app such as Mailchimp, there will be a cost incurred in running a campaign.
You can create distribution lists that allow you to segment your market. This means your email message can reach a targeted audience based on information gathered during market research.
Emails are easily tracked and allow you to measure your results. If you want to understand what part of the email message people interacted with, or at which point or on which information people clicked through to a landing page, the right email campaign software platform will enable you to gather this information.
Strategies for Successful Email Marketing Campaigns
Average customer persona
If you want to run a successful email marketing campaign you need to first understand who you are trying to communicate with. This isn’t just generic information such as gender and age. That stuff matters, but if you want your campaign to really deliver results you need to build a persona of the average customer. This involves understand their likes and dislikes, how they socialise, what kind of TV they watch and what they do and don’t like. You would also want to know how your product or service might interest them. This is basic marketing but without it your email marketing campaign will be off to a bad start.
Build a quality email list
Building a good quality email list is crucial if you want your marketing campaign to be a success. If you need to email people in the EU or UK you will need to ensure they have opted in to receiving emails from you.
The best method of building an email list is by attracting warm leads through your website. This might involve providing a freebee such as a template or use of a digital tool in exchange for their email address. For instance, you would offer to deliver the business relevant freebee direct to their email inbox.
You could have a referral system that rewarded people for any referrals that led to others registering with your site. Or you could ask visitors to your site to sign up for a newsletter and offer discounts and other incentives to any who do.
Alternatively you could use social media to encourage people to pass on their email with offers or any other incentive. Surveys and competitions with prizes are also a good way of gathering relevant information on social media platforms.
You might consider influencer marketing to draw the right demographic or partner with another, non-competing, business with a following of the demographic you would like to attract.
Depending on the type of business you might also use bots to scrape data from social media sites, including contact details. This would suit a business to business scenario where the contact information is the business email.
If building your own list isn’t possible you might consider buying an email list. You would need to check the list was clean, which means up to date and compliant with any relevant laws. This method of email list building works best if the demographic of your target market isn’t too specific. However, the most effective email marketing campaign will target your average customer. So if the email list is too generic you may find the results are less successful.
Craft an attention-grabbing subject line
Once you have an email list you need to create the email. The most important part of the message is the subject line. Your email may never be opened if the subject line does not encourage the recipient to find out more. The subject line is effectively the headline. It’s the promise of what’s inside that will encourage others to take a look.
The best approach to creating a subject line for your campaign is to keep the message concise, use language that implies there is more information inside, ensure all the words are correctly spelt and don’t use spam trigger words such as ‘money’ or ‘help’. LinkedIn gives some advice on subject lines that work with some useful examples.
Create engaging content
Make sure the body of the email is tailored to your intended recipient. It’s not unusual to create different versions of an email depending on how segmented your market. You would also likely want to test the effectiveness of your email content on delivering results. I’ll cover email testing later.
Include a call to action (CTA) There’s little use in an email campaign that doesn’t lead to any further action. You need to be clear on what you want your email recipients to do, whether that’s to click through to a landing page on your website or sign up or register for an event or newsletter.
You need to make it worthwhile for others to take action, so consider what your offering and how your average target market persona might react to that offer.
Use visuals
Using graphics, animation or videos is a great way to engage email recipients. Which media you use for your email content will depend on your target demographic but visuals are useful for maintaining attention.
Time your emails effectively
If you fully understand your target market you should also have an understanding of when they are most likely to be online checking their emails. Timing your emails is as much about knowing when your target market is online as understanding what they are most likely to do online at different times of the day.
If you’ve sent emails to the target market demographic in the past you should have an idea of the open rate. This will tell you the best time of day to send your emails. If you time your emails correctly your email will arrive when your target market are most likely to be online and ready to open their emails.
A/B test subject lines and content
Getting the subject line and content correct may turn out to be a work in progress. If you use A/B testing you can get an idea of what works and use more of that for a successful campaign.
A/B testing involves creating two versions of your email and sending each to two separate groups of people. You would then analyse the outcome by assessing which parts of the emails were effective and which led to further action. This information could then be used to craft more effective emails. There are many email marketing platforms that support A/B testing such as Zoho Campaigns and Get Response.
Optimise for mobile devices
Make sure your email is optimised for mobile devices. More and more people look at their emails today on their phones. If your email hasn’t been optimised to display correctly on a smartphone all your efforts may come to nothing.
And finally…
In a world of tweets and chatbots, the short comings of email communication are clear. And for some business tasks which involve collaboration where a more immediate response is required, there are plenty of more effective software options on the market. But if your priority is to deliver a message with a simple call to action (CTA), email remains hard to beat.