Email marketing campaign – 5 steps for success

Email marketing campaign – 5 steps for success

When customers are constantly bombarded with notifications, it can be challenging to capture their inbox attention. However, there are ways to make your email marketing campaign stand out and be more effective, whether through the subject line, thank you pages, or through the content of the email itself.

To help, we’ve compiled five steps for success when launching an email marketing campaign. Utilising these tips will help cultivate a more personal relationship between you and your customers, grabbing their attention without being invasive. It will also help build trust, assuring that your customers stick around and look forward to the emails they receive from you.

1. Think of an email marketing campaign as a two-way conversation

Do you enjoy chatting with people who just go on and on about how great their business is going without asking anything about you? Or would you prefer hanging out with people who ask about you and share valuable and interesting information based on your responses?

An email marketing campaign follows the same principle. It’s not a place to brag about your business; instead, it’s an opportunity to provide useful, compelling content to your prospects and clients based on their interests. Think of it as a value exchange: you give readers important and interesting tips, stories and special offers in exchange for their time.

It’s also a place to show your personality. Be conversational with your reader instead of speaking in “marketing-ese” or in a dry “press release” tone. Send new opt-ins a welcome email that asks them to whitelist your email address, thanks them for subscribing and explains what they can expect to get from you in the future. Your emails should be written with openness and a friendly tone while remaining professional and aligned with your brand voice.

When you send engagingly written, valuable emails, your subscribers will be more likely to open and read them, which boosts your deliverability for the future.

2. Use authentic and transparent subject lines

Respect your readers’ intelligence; don’t try to trick them with deceptive subject lines. Click-baited opens will make your readers lose faith in you and will eventually lead them to stop opening your emails altogether, making your messages more likely to end up in the spam folder.

This doesn’t mean you should be boring. Tantalise the reader — but do it with clever copy:

• Keep it short. Keep your subject lines between 6-10 words for easiest readability.
• Make it personal. Swap generic greetings for personalised ones to better catch your readers’ attention.
• Offer a solution. An email subject line that offers tips or solutions will draw attention and be more appreciated.
• Build curiosity. Open-ended questions and clever subject lines open up a conversation and get you noticed by scanning readers.

More tips for getting your email opened:

• Use numbers to make a point or statement.
• Encourage action with a clear CTA.
• Include the occasional emoji.

Avoid using these spam content filter triggers:

• Sale.
• Free.
• Advertisement.
• $$$$$.
• ALL CAPS.
• Excessive punctuation.
• Too many emojis.

3. Test, test, test your email marketing campaign

There’s always room to improve your email marketing campaign, and one of the best ways to do that is through continuous split testing — pitting two or more versions of your email message against each other to see which performs better.

This gives you valuable insight into the email campaign’s performance while allowing you to increase engagement, opt-ins, and conversions by improving the quality of your final product. It all comes down to learning what your market wants to see in their inbox and adapting.

Split test everything: send dates and times, subject lines and preheaders, email templates, design and body copy. 

4. Segment emails based on customer data

Your list is one of your most valuable assets, as it contains everything your contacts have told you about themselves since day one. Between behavioral and demographic information gained in your CRM, you’ve got your finger on the pulse of each contact’s engagement with your business. Use the data to segment your list and send tailored content to each group.

By separating your list into groups based on their interests, you open up the opportunity to personalise your email marketing campaign and, in turn, significantly improve your email marketing results.

74% of marketers attribute targeted personalisation as the reason for increased customer engagement.

Here are a few types of segmented emails you might send to your list:

• Send an email about a sale at your bricks-and-mortar store to locals only.
• Send your top customers VIP sale offers and customer appreciation messages.
• Send cart abandoners and other hot leads special incentives to start shopping with you.

5. Optimise your thank you page

Take advantage of every opportunity to set the stage for future engagement with new email subscribers. Here are some ways to optimise your thank you page and increase the value of your opt-in process:

• Use a merge field to personalise your thank you message.
• Tell them how excited you are that they’ve joined your list and that you’re grateful they took the time to sign up.
• Give them a preview of the awesome content they’ll be receiving from you and the frequency with which they’ll receive it.
• Include social sharing buttons.
• Ask them to whitelist your sender address.

If you need help with improving your email marketing strategy and campaign effectiveness, contact us today.