Running a successful email marketing campaign is a critical and often overlooked, element of digital marketing. When the right content gets to the right person at the right time, It is capable of breaking through the noise, capturing their attention, nurturing their interest, and converting them.
The question, then, is this: how do you run a successful email marketing campaign?
With around 269 billion emails sent each day, there’s a lot of competition to steal your audience’s attention. The number of emails keeps increasing, too. That’s why it is important to learn how to do email marketing, the right way, so you can reach your target audience and tarp their attention.
In this article, we will take you through the steps in running a successful email marketing campaign.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing involves sending emails to existing and potential customers to increase brand awareness, drive sales and engagement, and generate or nurture existing leads.
What Is an Email Marketing Campaign?
An email marketing campaign is an email – marketing copy – sent from a business to one or more customers or prospects. A successful email marketing campaign will get its receivers to take action, engage with your business, and help you to get more sales. One of the big advantages of email marketing is that people still use email widely, which means you simply can’t ignore or neglect email marketing as a business owner.
Email marketing is the perfect tool for building customer relationships to help you generate or nurture existing leads and make more sales. Email marketing has the highest conversion rate of all marketing channels and delivers the best ROI.
But you can’t start running an email marketing campaign without doing some prep work. Follow the steps below, so you’re guaranteed a successful email marketing campaign.
8 Steps To Creating A Successful Email Marketing Campaign
STEP 1: Set Your Goals
One crucial step in running a successful email marketing campaign is to set your goals.
What results do you plan to achieve from your email marketing?
Most marketing strategies start with setting goals – email marketing should be no different.
Before you start sending out your email marketing campaign, consider the results, specifically, what you want to achieve.
Here are a few examples to get you thinking:
- To boost engagement with your brand across your social media handles, which might include inviting subscribers to a live session or prompting them to visit your website.
- Generate or nurture existing leads, which will prompt you to deliver high-value content.
- Keep engaging in-active subscribers
- Make more sales
STEP 2: KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
Getting familiar with your target audience is crucial prep work in running a successful email marketing campaign. Most times, it is possible that you probably have a vague idea of who your audience is, but a vague idea or guesswork won’t help you when it comes to producing successful email marketing campaigns that help you achieve your goals.
If you’ve been doing email marketing for a while, It is possible that you already know who your audience is. If you’re just getting started, you’ll have to research to target the right audience.
You can start by collecting data from google analytics or your social media post insights. This is a good starting point for you to craft a successful email marketing campaign.
STEP 3: BUILD AND FILTER YOUR EMAIL LIST
Building and filtering your email list is one of the best steps in running a successful email marketing campaign. Most times, it is possible to source emails online. However, sourcing emails on the internet might not be the best option as you only need your email list to be full of qualified leads interested in what you offer.
Also another benefit of building a quality email list is that emails are less likely to be marked as spam by the recipients, thus, protecting your brand’s identity and email deliverability rates.
The best way to build a targeted email list is to convert your website visitors into subscribers. To ensure you get the best results from your email marketing campaign, you need to send them to the right audience.
For example, if your brand is doing a free delivery in Lagos offer, Only people in Lagos should be targeted.
Other ways to segment your target audience include demographics such as age group or gender, psychographics, or behavior which includes benefits they seek, buyers’ status, their intent, e.t.c
There are several ways to grow your email lists:
- Add a sign-up form to your website. Ask website visitors to sign up for your newsletter, tips, eBook, white paper, checklist, or any other valuable resource.
- Use a sign-up sheet. If you have an e-commerce website, you can ask shoppers to jot down their email addresses on a sign-up sheet. Make sure they are aware of what they will receive in exchange for leaving their contact details with you.
- Drive sign-ups through social media. Share links to your website or landing page on social media, or add a Sign-Up button to your Facebook page to get your social media followers to join your email list.
Beware of unscrupulous ways to collect emails, such as buying email lists. This does not only affect your engagement and conversion rates but puts you at the risk of getting blocked or marked as spam by email service providers (ESPs.)
STEP 4: USE EMAIL MARKETING AUTOMATION TOOLS
Today, sending email messages makes subscribers feel like a friend is talking to them is easy.
You don’t want subscribers to feel like they are reading a message from another digital marketer who wants to sell them something.
You lose as soon as your emails sound like a promotion.
Your emails should read like they’re coming from someone who genuinely picked interest in subscribers.
Fortunately, there are tools to help with that.
- MailChimp is the tool that’ll help you understand your subscribers and communicate with them without sounding salesy.
MailChimp also helps with automating your email marketing processes. Once you set it up, it runs 24 hours a day nonstop without the need to keep checking on it.
- If you’re collecting emails on your website, you need an advanced popup tool like Optimonk. Optimonk is a feature-rich popup builder that helps you create stunning popups that convert at high rates and won’t annoy your site visitors. It has over 300 high converting templates which are professionally designed and mobile-friendly. Click here to see all its features.
STEP 5: CREATE IRRESISTIBLE OFFERS FOR YOUR VISITORS
Creating an offer your website visitors cannot resist is one effective strategy for running a successful email marketing campaign. To win the hearts of your prospective customers, you need to offer them something irresistible. Your competitors might have already created their enticing offers but instead of using that same offer, it is advisable to create something more enticing to beat the competition.
Give them something different. Make sure it’s an offer they are likely not to get from your competitors. This would prompt them to subscribe to your newsletters and always visit your website for more.
STEP 6: WRITE A COMPELLING SUBJECT LINE
The moment your email recipient sees your campaign in their mailbox, the first thing they see is the subject line. It just has to be action compelling and attention-trapping. Imagine you get an email copy with the subject line: Daniel, you are fired!!!
The first thing you want to do is to open that email immediately, right?
That is how your subject line should prompt your audience to open and read what you have for them quickly. You can also use emojis on your subject lines but it is advised to use just one emoji per subject line to avoid getting spammed.
STEP 7: CREATE AN EMAIL COPY WITH A CLEAR Call To Action (CTA)
After you must have drafted your subject line, the next thing to consider is your email copy – the body of the email.
Your email copy should offer value to your audience. It is important to create an email copy that’s not too salesy but dishes out value because that’s the only thing that you can offer your subscribers in exchange for their time.
Bonus tips:
- Keep it short and straight to the point: People barely have enough time and patience to read long content these days. So, it is advisable to keep it short – 95-120 words is ideal.
- Be conversational: Let your email marketing campaign sound like it’s coming from a real human, not a robot. Hence, you should personalize your email copy to stand out in the ever-increasing marketing competition.
- Include the offers: This is where your enticement strategy comes in.
- Add a clear Call-to-action: Adding CTAs like “click here to learn more” or “order now” is a good and concise way to get your audience to take necessary actions. However, make sure it is bold and visible.
- Include an opt-out option: Although this may not sound like something you want to do, it is very important to include an opt-out option in your email copy.
STEP 8: DON’T FORGET TO FOLLOW-UP
Don’t just collate email lists. Send email marketing campaigns and go to sleep. Ensure that you’re creating follow-ups to your emails. Your subscribers use the internet daily and keep subscribing to new websites or channels they find interesting.
Upon your first campaign, your audience might have questions about your products or services. So, creating a timely follow-up email can help you know and answer these questions.
You can also use a follow-up email to keep appreciating first-time customers and showcasing more products or services that they might be interested in.
CONCLUSION
If you haven’t started email marketing for your brand, I’m sure these tips are enough to get you started already.
Email marketing is a great way to sell your product or services online and build a strong relationship with your prospective customers.
