Do you know how to run a successfulemail marketing campaign? What are the steps you need to take to get up and running with email and ensure your email marketing campaigns are a success? Wondering if your email marketing strategy is working? With around269 billion emails sent each day, there’s a lot of competition for your audience’s attention.
Those email numbers keep going up, too. That’s why it’s essential to learn how to do email marketing right, so you can reach your target audience and keep their interest.
By the end of this guide you’ll know the steps you need to run a successful email marketing campaign so you can get more attention, engagement, leads and sales.
What Is an Email Marketing Campaign?
An email marketing campaign is an email sent from a business to one or more customers or prospects. A successful email marketing campaign will get the recipients to take action, engage with your business, and help you to get more leads and sales.
One of the big advantages of email marketing is that people still use email widely. In fact, as our article onwhy email marketing isn’t deadreveals, 90% of adults and 74% of teenagers still use email regularly.
This makes email marketing the perfect tool for building customer relationships to help yougenerate leadsand sales.
But before you run a successful email marketing campaign, you’ve got to do some prep work, so you’re primed for success when you finally send that first email.
Step 1. Build a Targeted Email List
The most successful email marketing campaigns start with an email list full of qualified leads that are interested in what you have to offer. The best way to build a targeted email list is toconvert your website visitors into subscribers.
There are a couple of different ways you can build your email list, but the right method for each campaign really depends on the purpose of your email marketing. If you plan to use email to keep in touch with existing customers, then your email list can be built largely by importing your existing customer details into your chosen email marketing tool. If you plan to use email to communicate with an audience whose email address you might not have yet, then you’ll need to start capturing email addresses and building your list from scratch.
What most people do when they want to build an email list is to put an optin form on their website and hope that people sign up. Unfortunately, this strategy usually doesn’t work very well.
To grow your email list, you need to attract people with a compelling offer. You need alead magnet. Fortunately for you, this is a 2-part formula for building your email list that is followed by many of the most successful email marketers around.
The formula is:
A valuable incentive (Lead Magnet) + simple subscribe opportunities = large email list
While it is a little bit of a simplification, it’s also just logic. Regardless of how many subscribe opportunities you present to a visitor, it’s unlikely they’ll act without a valuable incentive. And no matter how good your incentive is, you still need to make it simple for people to subscribe if you want to get them to join your list.
Well, here are some incentives you could use to entice people to join your email list:
- Compelling content– If you have a blog or produce content on your website, then offering to send your best content to subscribers via email is a powerful incentive for them to join your list.
- First order discounts– If you sell goods through an online store, then offering people a discount off their first order if they subscribe to your email list is an amazing incentive. Not only does it encourage people to subscribe, but gives them an incentive to purchase as well.
- Free or express shipping upgrade– Offering free or upgraded shipping on your customers’ purchase is a great incentive to join your list. Not only is this offer highly relevant – particularly when offered during the checkout process – but being able to get a desirable item into their hands quicker is a powerful motivator for people to subscribe.
But did you know that on average, 80% of your website visitors will leave your site for good, without signing up to your newsletter?
That’s why I recommend taking advantage of these Lead Magnets especially on exit-intent popups to convert those abandoning visitors into subscribers and customers.
Exit-intent popups detect user behavior to prompt them with a targeted campaign at the precise moment they are about to leave your site forever. This smart technology can skyrocket your conversions.
What can an exit intent popup do for your business? See these few case studies from OptinMonster for examples:
- How BrianTracy.com Increased Its Email List 150% Using Content Upgrades
- How SnackNation Adds 1200 Segmented Leads Every Week
- How Wild Water Adventures Recovered $61,000 in Sales Using OptinMonster
Step 2. Know Your Goals
It can be tempting to simply sign up for an email marketing tool and start sending your first campaign. But before jumping in head first, it’s worth taking a minute to think about your goals and what you really want to achieve with email, as that will dictate the type of campaigns you send, who you target, the content you include, and how you measure success.
All good marketing starts with setting goals, and email marketing is no different. To run a successful email marketing campaign, think about what you want to achieve.
Typical goals for an email marketing campaign include:
- Welcoming new subscribers and telling them about your business and values so you start to build a relationship with them.
- Boosting engagement with your content and your business, whether that’s promoting a webinar or trying to make an initial sale.
- Nurturing existing subscribers by providing something they’ll value.
- Re-engaging subscribers who haven’t been particularly active.
- Segmenting your subscribers so you can send more targeted email marketing campaigns.
You can also set email marketing goals according to your conversion goals.
Email should be an important component of every digitalmarketing planbecause of its effectiveness in driving conversions and building brand loyalty.
The key to establishing the correct goals for your email marketing initiative is to align them with your company’s wider marketing goals & KPIs. Is the goal to drive new signups for your product? New leads for your sales team? More attendees for your event? More donations for your cause?
Email marketing is the single most powerful channel to reach your audience, and it can be used to achieve a number of different objectives, so it’s worth spending some time thinking about what you want to achieve with it before jumping in.
To help you identify what your goals should be, here are some examples of how some companies use email marketing:
- BuzzFeed– The popular news and entertainment website earns revenue by selling advertisements on their site, so the key objective of their marketing team is to drive more traffic. With that in mind, BuzzFeed sends regular email newsletters containing links to stories on their website with the goal of increasing the number of visits they get each month and increasing the amount of revenue they generate.
- Rip Curl– The global surfing brand generates revenue through the sale of wetsuits, t-shirts, boardshorts and other surfing goods. The goal of their marketing team is to increase sales, so they use email to promote new products they’re launching to try to drive people to their online or physical stores to purchase those products.
- UNICEF– The global charity organization provides humanitarian aid and assistance to mothers and children in developing nations around the world. Success to their digital marketing team is donations, so they use email marketing to reach out to their donor base, educate them on aid projects UNICEF is undertaking, and ask for donations.
- SXSW, Inc.– This lean organization organizes some of the most well-known events in the world, including the SXSW film, music and interactive festivals held every year in Austin, Texas. The goal of their marketing team is to increase ticket sales and attendees at these events, so they use email marketing to keep subscribers up to date as new artists and speakers join the lineup.
- Soho House– This prestigious members-only club is a regular hangout for celebrities and media moguls around the world. The goal of their marketing team is to keep their member base engaged in the club and regularly using the facilities, so they use email marketing to keep their members up-to-date on events and functions they can attend.
As you can see from these examples, planning what you want to achieve with email before you start sending makes it much easier to identify what to send and who to send it to, and helps you create focused, high-performing email campaigns that will achieve your marketing goals.
Step 3. Understand Email Types
It’s also important to understand the different types of email that you can send. People group these in different ways.
Let’s take a look at the different types of campaigns and how they can help you achieve your email marketing goals:
Promotional Email:
We’re all familiar with promotional emails, which talk about offers and sales and are self-promotional.
Few Kinds of Promotional Email Include:
Marketing Offer
A marketing offer email is essentially any campaign you send with the goal of driving a direct response.
This can take a number of different forms, including:
- A campaign showcasing some of the latest stock and encouraging people to purchase
- A campaign offering a discount or special promotion on your products or services
A great example of a marketing offer campaign is this email from Pizza Hut:
The campaign presents one of their products at a special, promotional price and includes a direct call to action to purchase – the green “Order Now” button.
The marketing offer email is effective if your goal with email is to directly drive sales. It presents a product or discount offer and includes a direct call to action for people to click-through to your website and make a purchase.
Announcement
An announcement campaign is an email sent to your subscribers announcing a new product, feature, or service.
A prime example of an announcement campaign is this email from Showtime announcing the launch of their new show Penny Dreadful.
The announcement email is perfect if you want to keep an engaged audience (i.e. existing customers) up-to-date on your latest products or features. While the sharing of information is the primary goal, the email may have the added benefit of driving people back to your store or website where they can make a purchase.
Event Invitation
An event invitation email is a campaign designed to increase awareness of your event and encourage people to attend.
Here is a great example from Lincoln Motors.
As you can see, the campaign invites subscribers to the launch of the 2016 MKX and contains details on the date, time, and location of the event, as well as information on how to RSVP.
Relational Emails:
Then there arerelational emails, which give subscribers what you’ve promised, like aweekly newsletter, a free gift, relevant information they can use, and so on.
Newsletter:
Anemail newsletteris a regularly distributed email campaign that is generally about one main topic of interest.
A typical example: AirBnB regularly sends a great newsletter to their network of freelance photographers.
As you can see, the campaign is sent monthly and contains content around a particular theme: photography tips & stories.
If your goal is to keep in touch with a list of people you already know (i.e. existing customers), then a newsletter is the perfect type of campaign to send. It will keep your business and your products top of mind and drive people back to your website.
3. Transactional Emails:
There are alsotransactional emails, which include:
- Subscriber signup confirmations
- Welcome messages
- Order or purchase confirmations
- Acknowledgements of changes to subscriber information
Transactional emails are usually triggered by subscribers’ actions and relate to an action they’ve taken on your site.
As mentioned before, the type of email campaign you send depends entirely on your goals with email. If you’re looking to drive direct sales then sending marketing offer and announcement campaigns are going to return the best results, however if you are simply looking to keep your existing customers up-to-date on the latest projects, products or developments at your company, then sending a regular newsletter is going to be the best way to achieve that.
Now that you know the types of email you can send, it’s time to move onto the next step to create a successful email marketing campaign.
Step 4. Know Your Audience
No matter what you sell, you need to have a clear idea of who your audience is in order to effectively communicate with them. This might sound like an easy task—after all, one of your most important jobs as a small business owner is understanding your brand’s demographic inside and out.
To help you understand your audience properly; you need to evaluate certain variables:
Signup sources
Some of the most valuable data your signup form has to offer is how and where subscribers sign up for your list. If you’re an e-commerce business with your store connected to Mailchimp, knowing where your customers joined your list can give you a better idea of how to communicate with them and where you might want to focus your marketing efforts going forward.
For example, if you see that the majority of your signups are being generated from forms you’ve shared on Facebook and Twitter, then you might want to focus on connecting with your customers—and potential customers—through social media. You can even create segments to target people who joined your list through a specific method, whether it’s an integration like Facebook, an app like Mailchimp Subscribe, an e-commerce integration, or a hosted form. And if there’s a specific page on your website you want to track signups from, you can add a hidden field to your embedded form and place it on multiple pages.
Insights From Google Analytics & Social Media
You can gather data fromGoogle Analyticsand your social media profiles, like theFacebook Insightsdata shown below:
Both sources have data on demographics, location, and interests, plus a bunch of other metrics, that’ll give you a snapshot of who your customers are and what they’re interested in. That’s a good starting point for crafting successful email marketing campaigns.
Segments and groups
Once you’ve identified smaller collections of people within your larger audience, you’ll be able to create groups and segments to send more relevant campaigns to your recipients—and the more relevant the campaign, the better the results.
Groups are an easy way to organize your list into categories so that you only need to maintain a single list in your account. Let’s say you have an e-commerce store and use your email marketing account to communicate with sales representatives, retail locations that sell some of your products, and customers. The logical step might seem to be creating separate lists to track these three audiences, but adding them to groups on one list is a similar concept that can save you money. You can then build segments for these groups and send campaigns that are relevant to them.
There are times when you’ll want to send to your entire list, but taking advantage of segmentation tools from email marketing provider’s (like mailchimp) can significantly increase the click-through rates and e-commerce orders your campaigns generate. Create custom segments from data you’ve collected for your subscribers—like e-commerce activity and email engagement—or, if you’re new to segments, use one of our pre-built segments to make targeting people on your list even easier. And these email marketing providers also have predicted demographic tool to help you zero in on who is opening your emails—their gender and age range—and let that guide how you segment and what content you send.
Step 5. Use Technology Wisely
Thebest email marketing serviceshave tools to help you create more successful email marketing campaigns. Look for features like:
- Easy campaign creation and automation, including templates and workflows.
- Integrations with software you already use, like WordPress and OptinMonster.
- Ways to segment your audience.
- In-depth analytics on email campaign performance.
Features like Mailchimp’s automations pictured below will help you schedule transactional emails and blog-driven updates, respond quickly to customers, and create and deliver promotional and relational emails. These are all good ways to build success with email marketing.
Step 6. Create Great Optins
It goes without saying that you need to get people on your email list to run a successful campaign.
To do that, you’ll need to create attractive optin forms that get attention and encourage people to sign up. Experiment with different types of optin forms on different parts of your site, including:
- Welcome gates, which appear when people arrive on your site. You can also use our page slide feature so people can get straight to the content when they’re ready.
- Lightbox popups, which can appear on any page and temporarily blank out the rest of the content to focus on the optin. These convert very well.
- Exit-intent popups, which appear when people are about to leave the site. That’s a good time to offer your lead magnet.
For best results, put optins in multiple places and choose how they appear with rules andpage-level targeting. That cuts down on the annoyance level while maintaining effectiveness.
Step 7. Plan Emails and Followups
Once you know your goals, email type and audience and you’ve attracted people onto your list with targeted optins, it’s time to plan your email marketing campaign. This will give you an overview to use when you start creating the emails in steps #7 through #9.
A good approach is to note down:
- Email frequency, which we’ll look at below
- Type of email, as mentioned in step #2
- A rough idea of content
- The main action you want subscribers to take (such as signing up for an event, following you on social media, buying a product)
Kuno Creativesays that in creating your emails you need to make them timely, relevant, interesting and valuable.
For example, many companies welcome new subscribers with a short email series to help them get to know their products and services.
Asana sends a series of 4 emails. The email subject lines are:
- Welcome to Asana
- What do you need to get done this week?
- Plan your day with Asana
- Hit your next deadline
The first is a welcome email with 3 key tasks you can accomplish in the software. Three days later, there’s another email asking what you need to get done and encouraging you to start using the product. Two days later, there’s an email talking about the Asana dashboard. The series ends with an email two days later, which highlights the calendar view.
Don’t overwhelm your subscribers by emailing too often. That will send them straight to the spam button. Instead, stick to the schedule you’ve told them about so they know what to expect.
Don’t be afraid to ask for subscriber input on email scheduling via a poll or survey. You can also offer an “opt down” option for those who love your emails but don’t want to get them as often.
Once you’ve outlined your email plan, it’s time to start writing.
Step 8. Craft Your Subject Line
A good starting point for any successful email marketing campaign is the subject line, which plays a crucial role in getting people to open and click your emails. Like the headline on your blog post, an email subject line has to get attention so people want to go further.
You don’t have a lot of words to make an impression, either; report from Campaign Monitor’s datashows that most subject lines range from 41 to 50 characters. Even less of your subject line shows on mobile screens, so it’s wise to put the most important parts at the start.
Options for improving your subject lines include:
- Telling people what they’ll get when they open your emails; no need to be clever or witty unless that’s your brand’s personality.
- Adding personalization, as including people’s name in the subject line can keep them more engaged.
- Avoiding spam trigger words so your emails make it to the inbox.
- Borrowing one of these high-converting email subject lines and adapting it for your own use.
Step 9. Write the Copy
Next, it’s time to write your email marketing copy. You’ll want to create a hook right at the start that will get people to want to read on.
For best results, keep email marketing copy short, and avoid pitching your offer too early. You want people to get comfortable first.
Address subscribers by name. Personalized emails are more successful.Buffer also suggeststo personalize your emails based on need by sending emails that meet different user expectations. This makes them more targeted and more likely to be successful.Some studies showthat educating and segmenting your audience will boost your click through rate on emails by up to 50%.
Other items to consider for your email copy include:
- A personal story. Being human never hurts a company and often helps people make an emotional connection. Some of the most successful emails we’ve seen use this technique.
- Something of value to your readers. That can be a piece of content, some useful information or the resource you’re promoting. Make it clear how this will help them. The example below from SEMrushunderlines the potential benefit in the first line of the email.
- A poll, survey, GIF or video, all of which are proven to keep readers more engaged.
Of course, you don’t have to put all of those in every email. Ideally your emails should be short, with only a couple of main points within each one. If you do decide to go longer, make your email scannable.
The last part of your email marketing copy is the call to action (CTA). Your CTA reflects the one thing you most want people to do when they’ve read your email.
CTAs usually appear multiple times within your email marketing copy. While you don’t want to pitch to readers too soon, there’ll likely be a CTA near the start, in the middle and near the end.
The best calls to action are short and clear. If you’ve got your copy right, then it should be a no-brainer for subscribers to click your link.
Step 10. Focus on Email Marketing Campaign Design
Now that you’ve decided on your goals, built a bit of an audience, selected the type of campaign you’re going to send, determined the subject of your email and taken note of the write-ups you’ll use for the campaign, now it’s time to start building & designing your email.
Most email tools make it incredibly easy to create beautiful email marketing campaigns, but there are some fundamentals that you should know to make sure you get the best results from each campaign.
Structure your campaign for easy reading
Research shows that an adult’s attention span is, on average,eight seconds. With such a short attention span, you can assume people aren’t closely reading your campaigns word for word and are instead scanning through them looking for something of interest.
Therefore, writing long, text-heavy email campaigns isn’t the best approach. You need to structure your emails to help draw people into reading your content while guiding them toward the email’s call to action.
An effective way to do this is by using the inverted pyramid model:
As you can see from the example above, emails following the model contain a succinct headline that highlights the key message of the campaign, as well as supporting information and visuals to help convince readers about the benefits of clicking-through. The reader is then presented with a prominent call to action button that makes it crystal clear what to do next.
By using the inverted pyramid model to structure your emails for easy reading, you’ll help ensure your campaigns grab people’s attention and get a high click-through rate.
Use Images and Visuals to Boost Engagement
In the above pyramid model example, the bulk of the email is visual with minimal text. Ideally, you want to avoid walls or blocks of text. This is because visuals – both video and images – are more eye-catching.
They’re also more memorable and help content stand out.
In fact,studies have shownthat people can recall as much as 65% of visual content up to three days later compared to just 10% of text-based content.
People also follow visual instructions 32% better than written instructions, so it’s a good idea to use visuals when directing your readers to take a desired action.
Personalize Your Email Campaigns
When campaign monitors surveyed marketers, they found out that improving email personalization was the number one goal for 38% of marketers and was also the number one challenge for 36% of marketers. Marketing automation, segmented lists, and third party integrations make email personalization easier and more effective.
Your readers are most likely to respond to content that is most relevant to their interests. Start by adding their name in the subject line, then customize campaign content based on list segments to maximize engagement (more on that next).
Ensure your campaign is relevant to every subscriber
Even in the early stages of growing your email list, it’s a good idea to categorize subscribers into different list segments. List segments make it easy to choose what type of content to send to which subscriber. When you can personalize content and make it more relevant to a certain group you improve response rates.
This kind of targeted optimization is much better than sending blanket emails to everyone.
Why does email list segmentation matter? We know that beyond relevancy, list segmentation is important from a revenue perspective. Data from theDMAindicates that segmented and targeted emails generate 58% of all email revenue. On top of this,our researchfound that marketers who used segmented campaigns noted as much as a 76% increase in revenue–andmore than 76% of marketerssay basic segmentation is part of their email marketing strategy.
Here are some common email list segments you can create to increase click-throughs in your campaigns and plan more targeted content based on those segments:
- Geographic location – useful for promoting store-specific information and targeting specific markets while ignoring out-of-location subscribers where the message wouldn’t be relevant.
- Demographics – useful for customizing campaign messaging to any combination of age and gender ranges.
- Market – useful for segmenting users based on the market/industry interest to avoid sending the same email to everyone. Instead, tailor the message to industry/product/market specific content.
- Past activity – useful for segmenting subscribers by past open and click-through behavior. Study behavior to determine what type of content works best for specific segments to customize future campaigns.
- Workflow activity – useful for creating campaigns specific to subscribers who fall within certain stages of your funnel, like sending a campaign only to those subscribers who are more than 50% through an auto-responder series.
- Customer data – useful for eCommerce brands who want to send targeted campaigns to VIP customers as well campaigns solely targeting customers in danger of being lost who haven’t made a purchase within a specific time period.
There are two main ways to approach segmentation:
- Sort existing subscribers on the back-end using the subscriber data they provided when they signed up
- Allow subscribers to self-segment by using separate sign-up lists.
With the second method, your audience sees the same opt-ins throughout your site, but the list they’re added to changes based on the content they’re engaging with. So, if a user visits a recipe site and subscribes from a page featuring vegan recipes, they would be subscribed to a segmented list for vegans.
Global surfwear company Rip Curl understands the value of relevance and executes it well in their email newsletters:
Although Rip Curl sells women’s wetsuits and bikinis as well, they know who their male subscribers are so they only send relevant products and content to their male subscribers.
By using features of your email marketing account, likeSegments&Dynamic Content, you can ensure your emails are relevant to every one of your subscribers and increase the chances they’ll click-through from your campaign and make a purchase.
Ensure your campaigns are on brand and build trust
It’s likely that your email campaigns aren’t the only interaction your subscribers are having with your business. In fact, your subscribers probably visited your website or social media page to sign up for your email.
Because of this, it’s important that your email campaigns are aligned with the colors, fonts, and branding you use across all your other customer touchpoints so that your customers have a consistent experience with your brand.
Freshbooksdoes this effectively in their email marketing campaigns. The fonts, colors, buttons and even the iconographic style they use on their website are perfectly replicated in their email campaigns.
By ensuring your campaigns are aligned with the branding your subscribers see elsewhere, you build trust that the email is legitimate and increase the chance they’ll click-through.
Make it easy to convert
To drive your subscribers to click through from your email campaigns, you must make it as easy as possible for them to do so.
According tocampaign monitor’s research, 41% of email opens are happening on mobile devices, so if your campaigns aren’t optimized across all devices, then there’s a good chance you’re making it unnecessarily difficult for your subscribers to convert.
Check out this email newsletter as an example:
Because the template is responsive, the middle three sections of content stack on top of each other when viewed on a mobile device. This ensures the text and buttons remain a useable size (as opposed to being shrunk down) and make it effortless for subscribers to convert.
Take a Strategic Approach to Timing Your Campaigns
When creating campaigns, we recommend taking a strategic approach so that your emails follow a promotional or editorial calendar. Planning your campaigns helps you avoid waiting too long between sends or, worse yet, flooding subscribers with too much content.
Frequency matters, and how often you send emails can have a significant impact on your revenue and email engagement (and unsubscribe) rates. Send too much and subscribers can suffer email fatigue causing them to disengage and unsubscribe. Send too few and you lose the attention of your audience. They may even forget why they signed up leading them to unsubImport Demo & Style
scribe.
So, how often should you send emails?
Fortunately, there’s some data on how often people like to get emails. The chart belowfrom MarketingSherpagives you an idea of optimal send frequency:
The data was compiled from a survey of 2,057 adults who answered the question, “How often, if ever, would you like to receive promotional emails (e.g., coupons, sales notifications) from companies that you do business with?”
The data shows a spread of interest leaning toward higher-frequency email campaigns. There’s one thing to keep in mind though: these aren’t your subscribers.
If you’re unsure about email frequency the easiest solution is to ask your subscribers. Let them choose frequency settings or poll them to discover how often they want to hear from you.
Send More Than Promotional Content
In 2015, Marketing sherpa ran a study asking consumers “in which of the following ways, if any, would you prefer companies to communicate with you?”
More than 70% of respondents chose email, dominating a list of other choices including sms, social media, direct mail, and online/print ads. Not much has changed since then and consumers still prefer email.
But just because they want it doesn’t mean they want every email to be blatant promotion.
That’s a sure-fire way to get your list to hate your guts.
When plotting your email campaigns and choosing the content to include, aim for an 80/20 mix using the Pareto Principle. Simply put: 80% of your content should be devoted to valuable and useful information, and 20% should be devoted to the promotions, sales, and products/services you’re selling.
Take a look at these predictions and trendsshared by Convince and Convert, compiled from bothLitmusandcampaign monitor’s own reports:
It’s important to note how a number of growing trends revolve around content of value – not promotional content. Things like personalization and subscriber lifetime value, bite-sized content that’s easy to digest, stronger narratives and storytelling, richer experiences… that’s all key to crafting highly engaging emails that will grow your open and engagement rates.
Find Inspiration for Sending More Valuable Email Campaigns
If you’re coming up short on topics and what to include in your emails beyond general promotions, fear not. Every business, in every industry, has plenty of information to share. Whether or not that information is relevant or interesting in the eyes of your subscribers is what you need to determine.
Look for every opportunity to share valuable content over promotional content to keep interest and engagement high.
By applying these fundamentals ofhigh-converting campaignsto your first email, you’ll be able to create and send a campaign that captures subscriber’s attention, presents them relevant information and makes it easy for them to convert.
Email design matters in any successful email marketing campaign. If your emails look terrible, that reflects badly on you, and can make people stop reading. With more people than ever reading emails on mobile devices, it’s important to use a responsive email template so your email resizes automatically whether people are reading it on a phone, tablet, or desktop.
Most good emails have more text than images. There’s no denying that images make your email more attractive, but know that many people disable images. That means your email still has to work even if people can’t see them.
My tip: avoid hiding information in images, because that’s bad for email accessibility.
And remember to use alt tags to describe images so people who’ve disabled them know what they’re supposed to see. A good description might make subscribers enable images, which will make your emails look even better.
11. Measure Results, Test and Track
Finally, sending your email is just the first step in achieving email marketing success. To really nail it, you’ve got to collect data to improve future campaigns.
That means testing everything: design and layout, email marketing copy, subject lines and calls to action. Consider testing emails with different segments and experimenting with email send times, too.
You’ll also want to monitor email analytics from your service provider relating to opens, clicks, unsubscribes and forwards. This will enable you to figure out what’s working and what’s not with email marketing.
There are two places through which you can track the success of your email marketing campaigns: Your email marketing tool and your website analytics tool (such as Google Analytics).
The reports section of your email marketing tool is the place to go to understand how people interacted with your email campaigns.
The report presents to you the key metrics of your email marketing campaign, including:
- Number of unique opens– The number of unique subscribers who opened your campaign.
- Number of bounces– The number of email addresses to which your campaign could not be delivered (for a variety of different reasons).
- Number of emails not opened– The number of unique subscribers who did not open your campaign.
- Open rate– The percentage of all subscribers who opened your campaign.
- Click-Through Rate– The percentage of people who opened your campaign who then clicked on a link.
- Unsubscribe rate– The percentage of people who unsubscribed from your email list through this campaign.
- Spam complaints– The number (and percentage) of people who marked your campaign as Spam by clicking the ‘Mark as Spam’ buttons in their chosen email client (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, etc.).
- Shares– The number of people who forwarded your campaign to a friend (using the forward icon in your email template) or shared it via social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
These metrics give you a high-level overview of how your subscribers are interacting with your campaigns and allow you to compare the success of one campaign to another. If you want to go deeper and see the exact people who opened and clicked your campaign, what links they clicked, etc. you can do so by choosing some of the other reports from the right hand side menu.
Once you’ve spent some time analysing how people interacted with your email campaign, you can take it a step further and look at what happened after they clicked through to your website.
To do this, you need to have a web analytics tool (like Google Analytics) installed on your site. If you do, and you’ve enabled our Google Analytics integration, then you’ll be able to see details of any visits to your website from your email campaigns, including how long they spent on your site, what pages they visited, what campaigns they’re coming from and more.
With all the data at the ready you can start making and testing changes to your email campaigns to improve open and click through rates.
Split Testing Subject Lines to Improve Open Rates
When you pay attention to the open rates across your email campaigns you’ll begin to see what works and what doesn’t in capturing the attention and the click of various email segments.
But the only way to systematically improve your open rates is to split test your subject lines.
Email marketers looking to improve open rates will A/B test (split test) subject lines. To do this, make sure every bit of the email is the same, except the subject line. You can test different subject line lengths, different power words in subject lines, and generic vs. specific subject lines.
For example, you can test how your segments respond to personalization by testing an identical subject line that includes the subscriber’s first name against one that doesn’t include their name.
At Kleensa Promotion, we performed this test and found that personalized subject lines experienced a 30% increase in open rates.
There are more ways to improve open rates than personalization, starting with using tried and tested subject line templates like:
- Stop {Undesirable Emotion} Now
- {Desirable Outcome} (Your First 3 Steps)
- New {Thing}: What It Means For {Audience’s Role}
- What {Credible Influencers} Are Saying About {Topic}
- {Someone Audience Looks Up To} Can Afford Any {Product}, She Uses…
- Best {Emoji} + {Emoji} + {Emoji} = {Emoji}
- {Topic}, {Topic}, and {Seemingly Unrelated Topic}?
- {Personalized Company Name} + 497% More {Need} = {Emoji}
- {Emoji} Your {Emoji} With…
- {Personalized Name}, Earn {Something Desirable} Today Only
- You’re Missing Out On {Something Desirable}
- Tonight Only: A {Audience’s Role}’s Dream
- Want 587% More {Something Desirable}? {Emoji}
- This Is A Sales Email {Emoji}
- Don’t Forget! {Event} Today {Emoji}
- …When You’re Sick And Tired Of {Something Undesirable} {Emoji}
- “{Quote}”
- A {Topic} Process To Reduce 30-50% Workload {Emoji}
- {Topic} + {Topic} + {Topic}
- “I Love {Something Undesirable}!” (said no one ever)
When split testing and optimizing your subject lines there are a number of things you can do to try and improve performance, starting with using power words that capture attention like the ones shared blow by CoSchedule:
While testing, you also want to remove and avoid words that can trigger spam filters and significantly reduce open rates.
Next, consider including numbers in the subject line of your email – but only if it works naturally.According to one study from YesWarethat analyzed 115 million email campaigns, including numbers in the subject line can product higher open and reply rates.
And, while you’re testing your subject lines, try subjects of varying length. Since more than50% of all emails are opened on mobileit helps to create shorter subject lines that don’t trail off the edge of smaller screens. Best practices suggest subject lines around 17-24 characters long, or 3 to 5 words.
Improving Click-Through Rates for Email Campaigns
Ideally you want subscribers to go from your email to a landing page, product purchase, etc. – essentially, they need to click something in the email to take the next desired step. Keeping a close eye on campaign metrics will help you continually tweak your emails to improve click through rates.
There’s a lot you can do to boost those rates beyond creating a stronger call to action, including:
- Improving the layout – adjust your template to make content more readable so it flows naturally toward a call to action. When we redesigned a blog email at Kleensa we saw a 130% increasein click-throughs.
- Try new images – remember what we said about visual content? Campaigns with more engaging images hada 42% higher click through rate than those without.
- Visual CTAs – People are hard-wired to click buttons. It’s a concept called ‘affordance’ or a possible action between an object and an individual, so test different visual CTAs and button styles to boost conversions and click through rates.
- Test CTA placement – Where you put your call to action matters, so split test campaigns with your CTA in different locations.Digital Doughnut tested placement and found that a CTA on the right side of the email increased click through rates for their campaigns.
- Segment your emails – If you’re not seeing the conversions you expected then check your email list for opportunities to further segment and improve who you’re targeting
- Test timing – When emails are sent is as important as how often they’re sent.Research from Spaceship shows that people are more likely to open and click emails between 8pm and midnight. Be sure to test when you send emails and watch the campaign reports for ideal send times.
Post-Campaign Tips (Optimizing Campaign Performance)
Your metrics can tell you a lot about campaign performance and how to improve your email campaigns, but there are three things you should always do after every campaign, regardless of how they performed.
1. Resend the Campaign
No matter how effective the subject line, you’ll always have subscribers who don’t open it for a variety of reasons. Send your email again specifically targeting a list segment of those who didn’t open the first time around.
Not only is this a second chance in case they just missed the first email, it’s another opportunity to further split test subject lines as well as send times.
2. Clean your List
If rounds of split testing, segmentation, and resends still result in low engagement scores for some of your subscribers then don’t be afraid to clean your list. Review subscriber data regularly to monitor activity and engagement ratings. Remove or further segment those who aren’t engaging in order to improve the overall open rates of your primary subscriber segments.
3. Build awareness for your brand
Once you’ve finished your campaign and the final steps, build awareness for your brand across all available marketing channels. This includes more common methods (such as social media marketing and events), as well as more unusual brand awareness campaigns (like giveaways and contests).
As you build brand awareness, you can earn more followers and subscribers. This will play into your upcoming campaigns by giving you a wider, more engaged audience.
By having a wider and more diverse group of subscribers, you are more likely to attract more leads and gain more conversions. Ultimately, this means more interest and revenue for your business.
To Conclude:
Successful Email marketing campaigns are powerful drivers of sales & revenue for your business, and have a greater reach and return on investment than any other channel available to marketers today.
So, follow these 11 steps outlined in this guide to quickly and easily get started with email marketing campaign. You’ll definitely find it simple to create and send an email campaign, and it’ll drive unparalleled results exponentially for your business.
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