Learn the essential steps of creating successful email marketing campaigns, and best practices to consider when developing your email marketing strategy.
Email Marketing. A cost-effective, efficient way to market your brand. Great for well-established businesses, start-ups or individuals, a well-considered email marketing plan is a key component in growing your business, increasing revenue and ultimately – selling more stuff.
Creating and executing a regular programme of compelling marketing emails is not easy. It requires a careful balance of strategy and creativity. BUT achieving a regular plan of engaging content is fully within your control.
If you’re reading this, you’re already one step ahead of the competition. Taking some time to learn, plan and improve will pay dividends, and you’ll be ahead of the competition in no time.
Our step-by-step guide to email marketing covers everything you need to know to get started with (or reignite your passion for) email marketing.
Step 1 – Plan, Research & Set some Goals
Before you get busy crafting and creating your emails, it’s important to take a moment to define your strategy. This will help guide you through the creation process and ensure your efforts deliver what you’re looking for.
All great email marketing campaigns start with a bit of goal setting. Think about what you want to achieve. You can’t know where you want to get to without first defining your goals.
Common email marketing goals include driving website traffic, nurturing subscribers or re-engaging any old subscribers that haven’t opened your emails in a while.
It is only once you’ve nailed the ‘why’, can you start looking to the ‘how’.
Step 2 – Subscriber List Building
One of the hardest parts of email marketing is building a list of genuinely interested customers. The most successful campaigns start with an email list that’s full of qualified leads that are interested in hearing about what you have to offer.
To do this, you need to make it easy for them to sign up and to hear from you.
The best way to build your email list is to convert your website visitors into subscribers. Ideas such as including a pop-up box when people enter, or look to leave your website, adding links to sign up in your social media profiles and posts and ensure sign-up forms are easy to complete and easy to find.
If you’re not technically proficient, it might be worth looking to hire a digital marketing expert to set up the email capture forms for you.
Step 3 – Get to know your audience (Intimately)
While you might have an idea of who your target audience is, that’s not enough when it comes to creating truly effective email marketing campaigns.
Today’s consumers are FLOODED with marketing emails, so yours MUST stand out. We’ve become adept at ignoring unwanted attempts to attract our attention, so to succeed in this noisy marketplace segmentation is key.
Grouping your audience into segments according to common characteristics such as demographics, behaviours, and where they are in the customer journey allows you to target them with appropriate messages, offers and content – which is much more likely to drive engagement and conversions.
Step 4 – Get creative
If you use an email marketing platform like transpond, designing and creating email marketing campaigns is a doddle. Work from pre-designed email templates or use our simple drag and drop editor to design in just a few minutes.
The key here is to keep it simple. The more complicated you make a design, the more you risk confusing your recipients.
Design can make or break an email campaign, so sticking to a few simple design rules will help ensure you design an email campaign that works.
Step 5 – Write enticing email copy and nail your subject line
Next, it’s time to think about the text content. Crafting succinct and successful copy that will convert takes time, focus and some skill.
When an email hits the inbox, there are three components that a recipient can see before they even open it. These are the email sender name, the subject line and preview text. Get these wrong and all your attempts to create a great visual and enticing experience inside will be in vain.
We’ve rounded up the most useful tips to help you nail your subject line and get your customers hooked.
Once your recipient has deemed your email worthy of an open, you need to make sure your headlines, body copy and calls to action are all on point.
Be sure to keep your email concise. If you’re writing hundreds of words in the body of an email, it’s likely you’re doing it wrong. In most cases, people only skim read emails, so you need to quickly get to the point to ensure your messages are clear.
Step 6 – Stay out of the SPAM folder
Once you’ve created your beautiful, succinct, and engaging email that’s ready to get people to convert, make sure it reaches the inbox and stay out of the SPAM folder.
Remember, bigger isn’t necessarily better, so practice good email hygiene and be sure to remove inactive and bounced email addresses from your list. Doing this periodically can improve your email sender rating and increase engagement rates.
While you might be tempted to keep people on your lists, it’s illegal to hide how someone can unsubscribe from your email marketing. Failure to include an unsubscribe link may mean your email just ends up in the junk. Adding a clear ‘click here to unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of every email ensures you’re compliant with the law.
Step 7 – Test, test, and test again
Before you hit the send button, take some time to test, review and re-test to ensure your email isn’t sent with any unfortunate typos or errors. We’re only human!
Send yourself a test and check every word, every image, and CTA with a fine-tooth comb. Make sure you don’t forget to proof your subject line or pre-header text here too.
Send it to a colleague or a friend to check over before pressing that button. A second, fresh, pair of eyes are often key in helping you unearth pesky mistakes that can elude the author.
Step 8 – Measure your results
Hold it, there’s just one more step to go.
Clicking ‘send’ isn’t the last step of your email campaign. It’s important to monitor email send data to help you improve and optimise your future email campaigns.
Testing subject lines, design, layout, send times and more is the best way to ensure you understand whether your email campaigns are working. Email analytics can help you identify potential areas of improvement, what works with your audience, how people are engaging with your emails and more.
Keeping track of opens, clicks, unsubscribes and forwards provides invaluable data to help you monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Use technology to your advantage
The best email marketing services offer simple tools to help you create successful campaigns. Easy campaign creation through templates, automation through workflows, and integrations with software you already use like Salesforce or Slack are all features that can all help you build a successful email marketing campaign.
Remember, practice makes perfect, so use this step-by-step guide as your starting point, and use it to help you learn about what works for you, and your audience.
Be sure to follow transpond on Twitter and Facebook for more email marketing tips, advice and support.