Benard Kiplangat How do you perform an effective email marketing campaign? How can you optimize your campaigns for a better ROI? If you’ve been battling these questions and many others, this article will give you the tips you need to run a successful email marketing campaign.
Email marketing has become one of the most popular and effective forms of marketing. Businesses use email to create, communicate, and deliver their business offerings to customers and prospects.
And if you look at the data, you will see it’s worth investing your efforts and money into it. For example, there are over four billion daily email users, and the average ROI for email marketing is $36 for every $1 spent.
While the data isn’t everything, here’s a process to run an effective email marketing campaign:
Contents
- Planning your email marketing campaign
- Marketing strategies to grow your email subscribers list
- Writing persuasive email copy that doesn’t bore the readers
- Measuring your email marketing campaign performance
Planning your email marketing campaign
#1 Set clear goals for your email marketing campaign
Setting clear goals for your campaign is the first tip to running an effective email campaign. That is, you must know the purpose you want to accomplish for your business through your email marketing campaigns.
Do you want to get more customers? Or is it that you want to gather feedback from your customers? Do you want to drive more leads or boost your brand’s awareness?
While these are broad goals for any campaign, you must determine the specific email marketing goals that align perfectly with your bigger business goals. For example, if you want to generate revenue for your business, you can narrow it down to a specific one, like gaining 100 new customers by December 31st through email.
No matter what you choose to gain from your email campaigns, make sure that your goals are attainable, specific, and actionable. You can create multiple campaigns to address different marketing goals and objectives. That way, it becomes easier to adjust your email marketing content to reach the right audience.
#2 Know your target audience
Relevancy in email marketing comes up when you know your audience better. It is impossible to craft content that resonates with your readers if you do not know what irritates them or what sparks their interest.
And there are a thousand ways to learn more about your audience. From market research to social insights and social media listening, you can learn which content resonates with the people who read your emails.
The most popular way of getting to know your audience better is by creating buyer personas. You create buyer personas by collecting information about your readers through surveys, questionnaires, etc. And from the user data, you define an ideal customer profile that you’ll use to represent all the other users with similar characteristics.
When you craft an email copy to address your potential customers’ issues, you reference your buyer personas to create targeted messaging.
No matter how you prefer to collect your potential customer’s data, understand their deeper desires, interests, and pain points. More importantly, focus on unbiased and authentic insights to inform your email marketing strategy.
Ask them strategic questions to uncover deep insights into their buying behavior. Then, use the insights you gained to inform your email marketing campaigns.
#3 Find the best email services and tools
Another important way to run an effective email marketing campaign is to choose the right tools. Finding the right email marketing services and tools can significantly impact your email marketing success. It is important because these tools make it easier for you to create, send, manage, and track every aspect of your email marketing campaigns.
The software products you choose for your email marketing campaign will help you deliver the best experiences to your email subscribers. So, it is crucial to pick the right tools to help you drive your email marketing toward success.
It’s also important to understand that a lot of your success with email marketing depends entirely on the email marketing software you choose because they ensure your emails get delivered.
If you pick the wrong tools, you may lose time and money for your email campaigns. You risk getting the worst or fewer email marketing features to drive your email marketing campaigns to success.
Some features of a good email marketing service include the following:
- Intuitive and easy-to-use user interface
- Sends personalized and targeted bulk emails
- Effective email marketing list management
- Tracks your email deliverability, engagement, etc.
- Offers anti-spam strategies or tips
Marketing strategies to grow your email subscribers list
#4 Create an effective social media strategy
Social media can be a great way to collect subscribers for your email marketing campaigns. A well-thought-out social media plan is the most effective way to run your social media pages to complement your email marketing campaign efforts.
The first step you need to take to create a solid social media strategy is to gain a clear direction for your social media presence. Get to know where you are and where you desire to reach.
Second, determine your objective for each or all of your social media pages. How many email marketing subscribers do you wish to gain every month? How will you increase engagement and visibility for your content?
Next, if you keep questioning yourself critical questions about where you need to go, you will, at last, come to ask yourself how you will get there. That is, how will you translate engagement into email subscribers?
You must learn all the relevant social media tactics for each site and try them to drive your campaign forward. Understand the ideal content that resonates with your audience, the right post frequency, and the perfect content types and formats for your campaigns.
Once you take action, depending on the insights you gain from the previous step, you should measure them to know if you are progressing toward your goals and objectives. Learn about KPIs, customer engagement analytics, user feedback, etc.
#5 Explore email marketing partnerships
Partnering with brands allows you to promote your products with a shared audience. It helps you access a wider audience, grow your email list, increase conversions, and generate revenue for your business.
To ensure that you partner with the right audience, ensure that you access your potential partner’s resources, reputation, and brand appropriateness. Your partner’s target audience must also align with your ideal buyer personas for you to drive a profitable email marketing partnership with a huge ROI.
Offer giveaways, discounts, and contests to increase the likelihood that your partner’s audience will convert and become your lifelong customers.
#7 Blog strategically
Another way to gain more email subscribers is through blogging. Blogging is among the best strategies to get new leads and drive free and targeted traffic to your site.
Businesses with active blogs often get 67% more leads than those without blogs. So, if you do it right, you’ll soon see a spike in the number of email subscribers on your list.
Here’s how you can improve your email marketing campaign with an effective blogging strategy:
- Choose your niche: Find a suitable niche that resonates with your potential customer’s interests.
- Focus on quality: There are thousands of blog posts published every day. And to stand out amidst the noise, you need to produce quality blog posts that deliver immense value to the reader.
- Develop a promotion strategy: It is much easier to promote your blog content than asking random users to sign up for your email newsletter. You must promote your content to encourage more users to come and read your content. And from there, you can convert them into email subscribers.
- Design your blog accordingly: Always ensure that the way your blog looks can attract or repel readers. It is crucial to consider a design that both encourages smooth readability and matches your brand scheme.
- Leverage SEO: Ranking organically at the top of the search engine results page gives you free traffic to your site. This traffic can be your primary source of leads for your email marketing campaigns if you take it seriously.
- Implement an effective conversion strategy: Bringing more users to your site is not the final step you should take. You must also ensure that you have compelling calls to action to convert your readers into email subscribers.
Writing persuasive email copy that doesn’t bore the readers
#8 Improve your email open rates
Without a high open rate, it’s almost impossible to generate more revenue and drive an effective email marketing campaign. Getting a higher open rate means nailing your email headline, subject lines, and preview texts. So how can you write an epic email copy that gets seen and opened?
First, pick a unique profile photo that stands out from the crowd to represent your brand. A good profile photo is crucial, especially for Gmail users who can quickly see it when they scan their inbox.
Second, craft an engaging email subject line that’s relevant, interesting, and inspires users to take action. Put effort into writing your subject line, making it concise (six to ten words), personalized, and actionable with your word choice.
For example, include your recipient’s name and use action verbs in your email subject lines to increase their impact.
Next, the preview text is the next thing a user will see before opening your emails. It gives you a chance to entice your users and pique their interest before they decide the worth of opening your email. So, ensure that this short snippet is intriguing and follows up with your subject line’s promise.
#9 Personalize your emails to increase conversions
Personalizing your emails is one of the most critical email copywriting strategies to maximize conversions. If you want to write effective emails that get users to take the desired action, you must approach your subscribers on a personal level.
Personalization could be as simple as using the user’s first name in your email copy and making it conversational. Or, it can be as complex as creating a highly customized and dynamic email that meets every user’s needs based on their interests and preferences.
Beyond including a user’s name in your email copy, try segmenting your list into smaller groups based on interest. Employ automation by creating triggered emails based on defined criteria. Also, don’t forget each user’s special dates, including birthdays and anniversaries, with you.
Personalized emails can improve your open rates, drives engagement, and increase revenue by up to 760%. It works because when you treat each person on your list as a VIP and not just an email in a database, you will produce content that’s relevant and timely to the users.
#10 Write irresistible email calls to action (CTAs)
One of the most important elements of your email copy is your call to action (CTA). CTAs help users to take the desired or profitable action. Creating clear, concise, and compelling CTAs are utterly irresistible to click, whether it’s an internal email, a newsletter, a marketing email, or a fundraising request.
To craft a great email, you should first clarify your objective to know what you want the reader to do next after reading your email. That way, your subject line, preview text, email body, and other elements work together with your CTAs to help readers take the desired action.
When writing your CTAs, ensure that they’re short and sweet. Describe perfectly why the user should click the link and why they should do it now. Use simple action words, being specific as you can, and suggesting what the user gets in return for clicking the link on your email.
Additionally, distribute your CTAs across your email body in prominent locations to maximize your Click-Through rates.
Measuring your email marketing campaign performance
#11 Monitor the right email marketing metrics and KPIs
You’ve now launched a great email marketing campaign. But how will you know if it’s meeting your standards? Are they performing to your expectations?
If you’ve asked yourself these questions, then that’s where tracking KPIs come in.
Knowing what works and what doesn’t in your campaigns requires a lot of data. You must gather data to measure different headlines, email copy, images, etc. Launching a new product and campaigns over email to increase your sales volume doesn’t end after hitting send. You must test and keep improving your campaigns to maximize your ROI.
So, what are the best metrics that you can use to measure your email marketing campaign?
First, you must understand what you want to measure. What are the goals that you want to achieve? Is it to increase engagement, generate brand awareness, and grow an email list? Do you want to collect feedback from your readers?
Read More: Top 10 most important KPIs for Digital Marketers
Once you understand your reasons, it’s easy to pin down a few metrics that you can use to measure and optimize your progress toward your goal. Some of the key metrics to measure can include the following:
- Email delivery rate
- Open rates
- Click-Through Rates (CTR)
- Click-to-Open Rates (CTO/CTOR)
- Conversiones
- Bounce rate
- Unsubscribe rate
#12 Use a data reporting tool to measure the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign
Many email marketing services provide tools to measure your email marketing campaign. However, the data they provide on their dashboards may not be intuitive or clear enough to help you determine the right action to take. Some others are too little insight to take your email marketing campaign forward.
And to make the most of your email marketing data, consider using a data reporting tool to collect and report your email marketing insights. For example, our Mailchimp connector allows you to bring all your email marketing data to your favorite data analysis platforms.
When you gather all data from all your marketing channels into one place, it becomes easier to manage your campaigns. Data reporting helps you tell a story of your marketing data. It makes it easier to take action from the clear and powerful insights from your campaigns.
You can use the insights from your performing campaigns to improve your performance and take your performance to the next level for your performance. See what you can discontinue, improve, or add more effort to each campaign until you get the results you need.
Read more: What is marketing reporting and why is it essential?
Final thoughts
Understanding the building blocks of a great email marketing campaign can be a gateway to a successful marketing strategy.
You must plan, create a persuasive email copy, measure performance, and optimize your marketing strategy to take your campaigns to the next level. Remember, you can use Dataslayer to track your email marketing campaigns alongside other digital marketing channels.
In any way, email marketing campaigns aren’t easy, but when you do it right, they’re powerful and valuable for running a successful business. An effective email marketing campaign can set you apart from your competition and relate to your audience in exciting and creative ways.
We hope this article helped you learn how to drive a profitable email marketing campaign for your business.
