Building A Successful Email Marketing Campaign

With so many emails swamping our inboxes, as a business it’s hard to know what will cut through the noise and get the attention of your customers. If your business is a stickler for sending the same messages multiple times a day, you need to stop. That is not a successful email marketing campaign. Instead, think about building a strategy around your campaigns, fleshing them out step by step so that you get it right.

Build A Database

Before you even begin developing an email campaign, you need the database to send to. It might be worthwhile cleaning up your current database and organising customers into segments based on their activity or key characteristics. This will help you to tailor your email content later on so that it is more personalised.

You might also want to think about how you are capturing new email addresses by experimenting with your option forms. Whether that’s adding a welcome gate to your website that greets your customers as soon as they arrive on your site, or adding a lightbox pop-up that includes various offers and/or discounts in exchange for a mailing list sign-up. Either way, offering up some sort of incentive and changing up your messaging could really help to build up your database.

What’s The Goal?

You want to send an email – what’s the message? What do you want it to achieve? What journey are you taking the customer on? What action do you want your subscribers to take? These are important questions you need to ask before you even start on the content of each email.

Kickstarting a new email campaign requires careful consideration of your overall goals. Without knowing what your ideal end result is, there’s no way you should be scheduling that email to go out to your whole database. In order to get results, your emails should be timely, relevant and have clear messaging.

Regardless of whether this is a monthly newsletter or a flash sale, you should have a distinct plan beforehand of the email journey you want your customers to go on. This will include strong CTA’s that can be used as metrics to measure the success of the campaign. It doesn’t have to be a hard sell to be a campaign, even if your target is to boost your followers on your social media accounts through a one-off awareness message, this still requires a strategy to ensure you meet your objectives. Planning is key here, and you can only plan when you know what and who you are targeting.

Content

Making sure the content of your email fits in with your campaign goals is key, but it’s the ‘how’ that often leaves brand’s stumped.

Make It Valuable

Getting your message across in the right way is essential. If you get it right, you won’t need to overwhelm your customers with ten emails a day. Your content should consider the customer and give them something that is valuable to them. Sending emails with too much take and not a lot of give, is a quick way to lose credibility and therefore subscribers. Respect your customers and their data by making sure the reason you are contacting them is clear.

Make It Personal

Personalisation is another way to ensure the content of your emails hits the mark with your subscribers. Personalised subject lines have a higher open rate, but it shouldn’t just stop there. Think about those segments and tailor your content according to customer data. Reward loyal customers with a personalised discount or tailor the products featured according to a customer’s previous purchases. You could also offer free consultations or personalised advice with suggested blogs to read. The important thing here is to make sure your campaign stands out amongst the other generic emails that often fill up our inboxes. If you make the effort to create personalised campaigns, you’re more likely to see results.

Make It Compelling

First impressions count, especially when it comes to email. Don’t overlook your subject line in the planning stages and pop something in last minute. This is what will entice your subscribers to open your email in the first place, so it’s imperative you think it through. The best subject lines contain a sense of urgency and encourage your subscribers to act in some way. Personalisation also works well here.

Make It Mobile-Friendly

Think about who you are targeting and the device they may use to view your email on. The majority of people will probably view their emails on a mobile or tablet, which means your email should work well in this format. Using tools like Litmus to preview your emails across a range of devices and popular email clients, will ensure you are getting your message across in the right way for each format.

If you are looking for some assistance with your email marketing campaigns, our team of digital marketing experts can help put in place a strategy and creative that will deliver results. Get in touch by contacting us here for more information!