How to Run a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

If you thought email marketing was a fleeting fad of the past, think again. In fact, today, it boasts a substantial user base of over four billion users worldwide. This is over half of the world’s population!

Surprised?

And that’s not the only reason why marketers go nuts over email marketing.
Last year, the average ROI of email marketing was £29 for every 80 pence spent. Ka-ching!

So should you really care?

Well, think of it this way – this is a goldmine of an opportunity that could provide you with a significant stream of income, along with many other lucrative opportunities.

But before we dive in, there are a few questions which I am sure you are dying to ask!
• What types of emails are there?
• How do I go about designing the visual content of my email?
• AND – How do I know if my emails are successful?

And yes, if you’ve only just started dipping your toes into the email marketing pool, you may feel overwhelmed by the endless possibilities.

But please don’t worry!

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll show you the ropes on the fundamentals of email marketing and kit you out with some invaluable tips on how you can optimise your email campaigns to drum up some fantastic results.

Simply put, email marketing refers to the process of sending emails to both existing and prospective customers.

Email campaigns are usually run with the ultimate aim of boosting brand awareness, nurturing leads, hiking up engagement or simply making sales.

Now with that said, let’s take a closer look at some of the advantages of email marketing.

Advantages Of Email Marketing

1. High conversion rates:

Email continues to reign supreme as the most popular marketing channel for finding and picking up leads amongst B2B marketers today, boasting the highest conversion rate as well as Return on Investment (ROI). That’s approximately 30% more conversions than social media. Surprised?

2. Engage Your Audience with Your Brand:

The cat’s out of the bag.

Raise awareness of your new products, services, and brand by sharing valuable resources, educational content, updates and more with your beloved subscribers via email.

Engage your audience with your brand even further and really get your customers excited about your brand by making a habit of aligning your email content and design with your brand identity.

3. Generate Website Traffic

Great website content is pointless if no one’s going to see it.

It’s time to start hiking up that website traffic by directing your fellow email receivers to your site and making sure your content gets seen.

You can achieve this by adding a clear call-to-action to your emails, such as a teaser extract of a recent article, that transports your subscribers to your landing pages and sales pages to learn more about your products.

4. Drive Sales and Revenue

Getting your products and services seen by customers is what marketing is all about.

Utilise the power of email to get your business offerings in front of your target audience and start reeling them in so that you can start making some dough.

Try offering discounts on purchases or upselling and cross-selling techniques to increase the average order value.

You’ll also want to consider the visual appeal of your email as a representation of your business offerings- so don’t skimp.

5. Boost Other Marketing Channels

We’ve already established that email is the perfect channel for promoting your business and brand.

But why stop there?

Promote your brand to its fullest potential by weaving other marketing channels into your email marketing campaign and drawing your audience toward other customer touchpoints such as social media, landing pages or events.

For example, you might ask subscribers to write a personal review on social media or perhaps invite subscribers to participate in a fun Instagram challenge.

6. Gain Valuable Business Data

Let’s get personal.
Whether you’re using tracking analytics or feedback forms, gathering data on your customers enables you to learn more about their behaviour, which you’ll be able to leverage and improve your emails, business, products, and services.

Now that we have looked at the advantages let’s dive in and start building.

Step 1: Establish the goal of your email campaign

You wouldn’t start driving on a road trip without knowing which destination you’re headed to, would you?

It’s the same idea when constructing your email campaign.

If there is no sense of direction, you could end up thousands of miles away from your destination.

Therefore, before marching onto the creation phase, it’s essential that you’ve got an established set of goals in order if you’re hoping to stir up success and achieve real tangible results.

It’s imperative that you ask yourself, ‘What is it that I’m hoping to achieve with this campaign?’, ‘What action do I want your recipients to take upon opening my email?’

You might find it most beneficial for your business to focus your campaign on revenue generation, website traffic, or even lead nurturing.

Hint: If you’re feeling stumped, think about the broader goals of your business. Taking this into consideration will optimise the overall benefit of your email campaign.

Step 2: Define your target audience

There is plenty of fish in the sea.

The trouble is, that’s plenty of fish with a whole load of unique characteristics and needs.

But you wouldn’t go fishing for freshwater fish in the middle of the ocean, would you?

From age to gender, location to interests, preferences to engagement levels – if you’re looking to optimise conversions, you should segment your audience for every email campaign you run.

To get the most out of your campaign, explore and consider which segment(s) are likely to be most effective for your campaign.

Do you have any data on which audience segments appear most attracted or receptive to particular products or services?

Hint: If you’re feeling a little stuck, don’t be afraid to experiment and play around with different combos!

It’s also important to reflect upon the characteristics of your existing contacts, as well as the size of your database, when establishing your target audience.

After all, there’s no use designing an email campaign for an audience segment to which you’ve got limited access to.

If you’re struggling with a contact database that’s a little lacking, bulk it up with the right contacts by adding a sign-up form to your website and encouraging visitors to disclose their email in exchange for a newsletter, eBook or anything else you can think of that might be of value to your audience.

Step 3: Selecting your email campaign type

The types of emails you send are the bread and butter of any email marketing campaign.

Use your defined goal and target audience from the stages above to inform this next crucial stage and really optimise the success of your campaign.

Take a look at the list we’ve compiled below of just some popular email campaign types that every marketer should know.

Welcome Email Series

A customer typically receives a welcome email when they sign up to your email list, perhaps after creating an account or joining a newsletter.

With an impressive open rate of 50%, welcome emails are an excellent way to initiate and start building that relationship with new potential customers.

This is because their main focus is to outline your purpose or added value, as well as set expectations for any future email communication, as well as providing a simple and actionable next step or incentive.

Whether you’re looking to invite your new subscribers to download your app or encourage them to participate in an upcoming social media giveaway, use this opportunity to pique their curiosity and get them chomping at the bit to find out more.

Announcement/Promotional emails

What’s the latest with your business?

If you’ve got any new products, sales, events, holidays, or anniversaries on the horizon, let your subscribers know and get them in on the excitement!

Note that this type of email should really highlight the usefulness or desirability of the thing you are announcing or promoting, with a clear outline of how it benefits your subscribers if you’re looking to kickstart that buzz.

Cart abandonment campaigns

‘Leaving so soon?’

For the customers who’ve left your site abruptly after filling their cart with goodies, don’t let them wriggle away- recapture their attention and persuade them to complete their purchase with an email detailing urgent reminders and incentives such as discounts or free shipping.

Remember that these users have already expressed an interest in your business, so it should be much easier and more cost-effective to reel them in compared to prospective customers who are yet to engage with your business.

So, if you’re skipping out on this step, you couldn’t be missing out on a major source of revenue

Post-purchase drip

On the flip side, you’ll also want to be getting in touch with your customers who have successfully completed their purchase and enhance their experience with a post-purchase drip email.

Take this chance to really express your gratitude and thank the customer for their patronage- and consider how you might use this opportunity to boost future revenue.

You might offer your subscribers a discount on their next order or even encourage them to write a review and share their experiences to encourage more purchases from future customers hopefully.

Newsletters

An oldie but goldie (whilst this can be a more time-consuming one), newsletters are a great tool for building trust and long-term relationships with your customers – perhaps even more so than the other types of emails featured in this list.

Establish yourself as an expert in your field and grow your email database by keeping your audience updated with the latest and greatest from your business.

Step 4: Designing the visual contents

Your email could be full of the most valuable and insightful content in the world, but if it doesn’t look good or visually translate – it won’t make much of a splash.

That’s why good quality design is a non-negotiable if you’re really looking to catch your subscribers’ attention, and persuade them to engage with your emails.

One way to keep your email looking in tip-top shape is to make your visual brand identity paramount with respect to all of your design choices.

That means font, colours, images, the whole shebang!

If the visual content of your emails doesn’t fit seamlessly together or appear to align with your brand, it won’t come across as very professional and you’ll be less likely to illicit a response.

Furthermore, another thing to consider is your use of graphics and white space.

An imageless essay without any breaks in between can leave your email looking like a long and boring, tedious read.

Make sure to break up your text with some jaw-droppings pics and some hilarious gifs, or simply sprinkle in some white space between points to enhance your subscribers’ understanding and capture their attention.

Lastly, it’s very important to think about the format and layout of your email- both on desktop and mobile devices.

For example, you’ll want to make a habit of avoiding the use of large images that don’t load properly when it comes to small screens or slow internet connections.

It’s also a great idea to experiment with different alignment structures and visual hierarchy principles to break up and organise your email content.

Step 5: Composing your written content

Don’t sabotage your campaign efforts with a poorly written generic email. After all, the written portion of an email is really what your subscribers are here for.

In order to effectively engage your subscribers and nurture that relationship, it is imperative that the writing in your email is clear, coherent, and compelling.

The most important thing to remember in this department is to keep spelling and grammar in check.

Poor grammar presents itself as a red flag to subscribers and can negatively reflect your business as unprofessional.

It is important to make a habit of eliminating grammar mistakes by proofreading your work aloud, getting a trusted colleague to look over it or running your text through a reputable grammar check program, such as Grammarly.

Also, with email personalisation hiking up open rates by 22.28% and click-through rates by 3.32%, you’ll want to make a special effort to tailor your emails to each recipient.

If it appears you’ve merely sent out a generic automated email to the entire email list, the recipient won’t feel very valued and will quickly lose interest in your brand.

Finally, try to adopt a pleasant, approachable and conversational writing style.

Talking to your subscribers in a way that you might talk to a friend will give your email a more personable and relatable feel, which will ultimately translate into higher levels of engagement and conversions.

Step 6: Choosing the perfect time to send your email

When it comes to running an email marketing campaign for your business, timing can mean the difference between a raging success and a flatlining dud.

That’s why you need to make sure you’re sending your emails out at the right time.

For instance, there wouldn’t be much use sending out an email at 4 am when the majority of your recipients are asleep and almost certainly not up scouring their emails.

After all, it would only end up buried under the huge pile of other emails than will have inevitably found themselves on top of your email by the morning.
(Just as a general rule of thumb, the best days to send out emails are Tuesday, Thursday, and Wednesday, and the best times are 10am, 2pm, and 8pm).

Although, if you’re operating in a different location to some of your target audience- make sure to add those different time zones into the mix.

Step 7: Setting up an email marketing automation programme

For those who aren’t in the ‘know’, a marketing automation programme refers to the use of a set of predefined rules that triggers specific email patterns to individual subscribers based on their online activity and interactions with your business.

This means that means less valuable time is being wasted through manually knocking together boatloads of emails, so you can free up your to-do list and spend your time more productively.

Instead, all you need to do is simply create your emails and set up their triggers and wait times before sitting back, kicking your legs up and letting the automation software work its magic.

Step 8: Measuring success

If this is your first email marketing campaign rodeo, it’s easy to feel like you’re taking a shot in the dark.

If you’re left feeling a little unsure of your email content, don’t feel pressured into diving into a campaign headfirst. Instead, test them out.

Taking new emails for a test drive not only gives you a great opportunity to enhance your current campaigns, but it can also help to enrich your understanding of your audience and inform future campaigns.

A popular way to test out the efficacy of your emails is the A/B testing method.

This method allows you test out two different versions of your email by sending each one to a small percentage of your contacts and measuring which one elicits a better response.

Additionally, it’s also a good idea to monitor your campaign even after it’s been set in motion.

Fortunately, the majority email marketing tools today offer extensive in-depth analytic features to give you a more concrete understanding of the way your emails are performing.

Make the most of these insights by exploring these key metrics and referring back to your initial objective.

For instance, if your main goal is to boost engagement with your emails, you may find it beneficial to refer to the click-through rate, which displays the average number of times recipients clicked on links or CTAs inside your emails.

Browse our other blog posts at Shape the Market to discover other ways to leverage social media and digital marketing to transform your business.