Without a doubt, email marketing is still one of the most effective forms of attracting customers. In the age of social media, email may be considered an obsolete channel for targeting an audience but it’s not. More than 31% of B2B marketers believe that email newsletters are effective for lead generation. Research also reveals that email is ranked consistently as the single most effective tactic for awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention.
Did you know that there are 3x more email accounts than there are Facebook & Twitter accounts combined? That is why email marketing makes sense in building your customer list. A survey by SaleCycle revealed that 59% of respondents said that email marketing has a direct impact on their purchase decisions.
According to a 2015 study by DMA, every $1 spent on email yields an average of $38 return on investment. When shopping for products, customers look for an email from their favorite stores. But effective email marketing goes beyond sending emails to customers. In this article, we shall take a look at the effects of how to launch an effective email marketing campaign.
Steps In Launching An Email Marketing Campaign
- Define Your Goals
- Identify Your Target Audience
- Choose Your Email Type
- Build Your Email Marketing List
- Create An Email Marketing Campaign
- Write The Email
- Make A Follow Up
- Test Your Email Marketing Campaign
- Measure Performance
Steps In Launching An Email Marketing Campaign
Launching an email marketing campaign is not as easy as you think it is. It is not enough that you create an email list and send it to whoever you want to target. In this article, we shall take a look at the steps on how to launch an email marketing campaign.
1. Define Your Goals
Before starting an email campaign, you first need to identify your goal and what you hope to achieve. It will help you determine what needs to be done to implement the campaign and can serve as your gauge in determining if your emails were successful. You can create one overall or small incremental goal but make sure that it is specific and measurable.
Your goal will determine the type of campaign to implement, your target market, the content, and how to measure your success. When setting your goals, it should be aligned with your company’s wider marketing goals & KPIs. Here are some possible goals that you can set for your email campaigns:
- Brand awareness
- Website traffic
- Revenue generation
- Lead nurturing
- Feedbacks and surveys
By understanding your goal, you will have some direction with your email marketing campaign and help you achieve tangible results. Ask yourself why you are sending the email. Think of what you hope the outcome will be. Setting clear and defined goals can help you determine the rest of your campaign and can make it more effective.
2. Identify Your Target Audience
Whatever industry you are operating in, it is likely that you have a target market to cater to. Each customer has unique needs that need to be addressed. However, there is no one-size-fits-all when addressing customer concerns. For better conversion, you should segment your customer demographics for each campaign.
Segmenting your target audience will help you personalize your emails to your recipients. The more relevant the campaign, the better the results. By segmenting recipients, you can significantly increase click-through rates and e-commerce orders. By sending personalized emails, you can look forward to increased engagement, trustful relationships, and greater ROI.
Sending emails to the right audience can lead to more people opening and engaging with your messages. Studies show that sending personalized emails can increase open rates by 22.28% and click-through rates by 3.32%.
3. Choose Your Email Type
There are different types of email marketing campaigns that you can implement depending on your goal and target audience. Here are some of the most popular types of email marketing campaigns you can implement.
- Welcome Email. This type of email is the first type of email that your subscribers receive after signing up for a mailing list or purchasing an item. Sending emails is a great way to introduce new customers to your brand, products, or services. They have an average open rate of 50%. Welcome emails should be short and actionable and should direct subscribers to the “next step.”
- Cart Abandonment Email. This type of email is sent to shoppers who previously visited your store, placed some items in their shopping cart, but left without completing the purchase.
- Newsletter Newsletters are one of the most popular types of email campaigns. They are usually non-promotional and can be useful for sharing industry news and updates, tips, tricks, features, blog roundups, and others to subscribers.
- Re-engagement Emails. These types of emails target inactive subscribers in the hope of getting them to engage with your brand and emails again. Re-engagement emails can come in the form of short surveys asking inactive subscribers what they’d like to see in future emails and using the information to create more relevant email content.
- Announcement Emails. These types of emails announce new products, sales, events, holidays, and anniversaries
- Holiday Emails. From the name itself, these are sent out during the Holiday Season to take advantage of increased shopping activity. Send out holiday emails to offer discounts, flash sales, bundles, and more to trigger purchases and increase order value.
- Invitation Emails. Invitation emails are sent by brands for events, product launchings, webinars, and conferences to gather more registrations and attendees
- Promotional Campaigns These emails are sent to promote products and services by highlighting features, showcasing reviews and testimonials, and adding CTAs for purchasing and education.
- Seasonal Campaigns These emails are sent around during specific times. For example, an apparel store sends out emails regarding their beachwear collection during the summer months, showcases jackets and coats in the winter, and gifts for moms during Mother’s Day.
4. Build Your Email List
To ensure the maximum impact of your email marketing campaign, you need to send them to the right people. For example, if your brand is organizing an event in a certain region or state, your email should only target relevant residents of that region. Another way is to target certain demographics like age or gender. There are several ways you can build your email list:
- Add a sign-up form to your website. Ask website visitors to subscribe for newsletters, tips, ebooks, white paper, checklists, or other valuable resources.
- Use a sign-up sheet. If you have a brick-and-mortar store, you can ask shoppers to jot down their email addresses on a sign-up sheet. Let them know exactly what they will receive in exchange for leaving their contact information.
- Drive sign-ups through social media. Share links to your opt-in page on social media or add a Sign-Up button to your Facebook page to encourage your social media followers to join your email list
As much as possible, avoid the unethical ways of building an email list like buying email lists. This will not only impact your engagement and conversion rate but also you could get blocked or marked as spam by email service providers. When building an email list, you should be aware of rules governing the use of email for commercial purposes such as GDPR, CAN-SPAM, and CCPA.
If you have current customers, you can start building your email list from them. You can import your existing customer details into your chosen email marketing platform. Just make sure that you have adequate permission from your subscribers if you plan to use their email addresses. You also have the option to build your email list from scratch.
5. Create an Email Marketing Campaign
Once you have already established your goal and identified your email type and target audience, you can start creating your email marketing campaign. You need to make your email campaign timely, relevant, interesting, and valuable. In planning your campaign, make sure to note down the following:
- Frequency of your email campaign
- Type of email
- Possible content
- The call to action
When creating your email campaign, make sure that you don’t overwhelm your subscribers with frequent emails. Otherwise, it will go straight to their spam emails. If you have already given them a schedule, stick to that so they know what to expect. You can ask for their input on email scheduling via a poll or survey. You can also offer an “opt-out” option for customers who don’t want to receive them often.
Finally, you need to identify your signup sources. Knowing where your customers joined your list can provide you with a better idea of how to communicate with them and where you might want to focus your marketing efforts going forward.
6. Write The Email Copy
When writing the email copy, you want to make sure that you get the attention of your target audience right away. The subject line is one of the most important elements of your copy as it helps your readers decide whether to open your email. Keep the following in mind when writing your subject line:
- Use keywords
- Make it benefit-driven
- Use active voice
- Make it personal
Next, you want to make sure that you get preview text right. Limited to a maximum of 140 characters, your text preview should be optimized to capture attention right away. Your text preview is an extension of your subject line and reinforces your value proposition.
Make your email easy to read and understand. As much as possible, use short sentences and paragraphs. Avoid using jargon and complicated words and use bullet points. The easier to read your email, the more likely they will engage with your business.
7. Make A Follow Up
Just because you have already sent an email does not mean you’re done. One single email is not enough. You need to follow up with a second or even a third email to nurture your subscribers and convert them successfully. You can apply this to different email campaign types whether cart abandonment, re-engagement campaigns, or welcome emails.
However, keep in mind that there is a fine line between following up and being annoying. Space out your emails and limit the number of emails you send. If you don’t, your customers might unsubscribe or your email may be marked as spam.
When writing a follow-up email, make sure that it is short, sweet, professional, and to the point. According to the Harvard Business Review, 47% of emails with lousy subject lines will be discarded. So from the subject line alone, you want to make sure that you immediately get the attention of your customers.
8. Test Your Email Marketing Campaign
Before sending out your email, test different versions of your email to a small percentage of your audience. This way, you will know which version performs better. By testing your email, you will be able to know how to improve your campaigns. In addition, it will help you learn more about your audience and how they interact with your email.
There’s no such thing as a “perfect” email but you can get the next best thing by creating a test email that you will send out to the test recipients. Emails are created differently so emails opened on mobile devices will look differently on a desktop or laptop so do take that into consideration.
Running an A/B test will let you test which subject line will get the most opens and clicks and which time of the day customers are likely to make a purchase through your campaign. In the long run, doing an A/B test on your email marketing campaign will help you improve your business.
9. Measure Performance
One of the best things about email marketing is that you can continuously track and improve the performance of your email campaigns. Using data analytics, you can refine your marketing strategy moving forward. Most email marketing tools allow in-depth analysis to help you understand whether your campaign is delivering desired results or not. Your email marketing tool will help you measure the following:
- Open Rate. This refers to the number of emails that were opened. It provides you with an analysis of how effective your email subject lines, sender name, and preheader text are.
- Click-through Rate. This refers to the average number of times customers clicked on links or CTAs inside your emails. The click-through rate is an important metric for understanding email engagement.
- Bounce Rate. This refers to the number of email addresses to which your campaign could not be delivered. A high bounce rate could hurt your overall campaign as it means you may need to change your email service provider.
- Unsubscribe Rate. This is the number of people who unsubscribed from your email list. A high unsubscribe rate means your email content is not relevant to your subscribers or you are not reaching the right audience.
- Spam Complaints. This is the number of times your email has been marked as spam. This could be due to your spammy subject lines, irrelevant email content, unsolicited emails, or issues with your email marketing software.
Measuring these metrics will give you an overview of how your subscribers interact with your campaigns and allow you to compare their effectiveness. Other important metrics include conversion rates, most visited pages, best-performing links, mobile open rates, revenue per email, and others.
Do align your metrics with your email marketing goals and focus on the most important ones that help you determine what’s working and what’s not. These email marketing metrics will help you compare against other companies in your industry.
Launching an email marketing campaign is not as easy as sending emails to your target audience. These 9 tips will help ensure that your email marketing campaign will not only become effective but also successful.
Outsource EMail Marketing with airisX
When you have a great product or service, one of the hardest things to do is to find buyers interested in what you’re selling. To fill this gap, airisX offers lead generation – our staff researches your business and target end users and creates email/contact lists for you to reach out to pitch. We offer lead generation for any business model – B2B, B2C, SaaS, consultancies, outsourcing companies (like ourselves!), ecommerce, etc.
We build your email list totally from scratch, or if you already have a list, help you find contact information for pre-targeted companies.