Email marketing campaigns are one of the most effective forms of advertising, in terms of ROI. A single dollar spent on email advertising can return hundreds to a business, making it an extraordinarily profitable enterprise. Of course, an email marketing campaign also needs to be carefully built to be effective. If you’re creating an email marketing campaign, your competitors are, as well. We’re going to give you email marketing tips on how to make an email campaign successful. You may be thinking, “what is email marketing and how does it work?” but we’re here to help you through the digital marketing process.
Email marketing is a form of digital marketing for businesses. Many of our retailers call it by different names: email blasts, newsletters, promo blasts, e-promos, mass emails, etc. No matter what you call it, all of these are types of email marketing.
We understand email is difficult to understand. Learn what is email marketing from our article.
1. Set Goals for Email Marketing
Every marketing campaign, whether through email or social media, is going to need to begin with goals. Some marketing strategies are designed to increase traffic to your website, while other marketing strategies are designed to get people in the door of your brick-and-mortar business. Set your goals early, as this is going to determine every aspect of your campaign, from your audience targeting to your content.
Some goals to jumpstart your email marketing measurements are:
- Deliver traffic to promotions
- Capture those who abandoned carts
- Prompt those who have purchased before
- Reach out to new customers
- Improve website traffic
- Direct customers to social media
- Build an email list larger
It’s important to make these goals SMART goals. You want to set realistic goals that can be measurable and substantial for your business. Your goal is also important because it tells you which email metrics you should be tracking to determine whether your current campaign is successful. For instance, if your campaign is designed to add traffic to your website, you’ll need to track hits to your website. You can use Google Analytics or call your agency to help you determine the success of your email campaign goal. If your website traffic is increasing, then you know the campaign is working. If the hits are remaining static, then there’s something about your email marketing campaign that isn’t functioning properly — you need to look further into how to make an email campaign successful.
2. Know When to Pitch Your Product
Customers go through a journey during the buying process. They begin with a general interest in your product and slowly become more interested in the details. Eventually, they start to want to actually make a purchase. In order to create a good email marketing process, you need to know when they are still interested in learning, and when they want to make a purchase.
This will often take some work, related to studying your customers and seeing how long it takes them to commit. Does your average customer take three months to make a purchase? Do you interact with them four times before they buy? Marketing metrics will be able to help you pare down to what works.
Send your emails accordingly; much to do with how to make an email campaign successful relates directly to the timing of your email marketing strategy.
3. Mix Your Email Campaign Types
Don’t just send one type of email. Your emails should be a consistent blend of personal content, promotional marketing, and content curation. You can send product updates, industry-related news, and news that is local to your area.
Some business email template types include:
- Welcome emails
- Promotional emails
- Engagement emails
- Newsletter emails
- Transactional emails
- Post-purchase emails
- eCommerce cart abandonment emails
- Re-engagement emails
The more content types you provide, the more likely you are to send some content that your customers are interested in. The broader your approach, the wider your audience will be — and the more likely your customers will be to remain on your mailing list, open up your emails, and continue to subscribe.
4. Embrace Email Automation
Automation in every form saves you both time and money. The better your automation is, the more responsive and useful it will be. An example of email automation is a service that automatically emails customers when new products and services have been added, or emails a customer who has left an item in their cart. For a brick-and-mortar business, email automation may be used to send out emails at scheduled intervals, so these emails can be set once and then forgotten. As a business owner, your time is important: you may not be able to get online to send email blasts on a regular basis.
Of course, email automation is also used to send out large batches of emails to email lists — so you can reach out to potential customers that you may not have had contact with before.
5. Segment Your Audience in Emails
Depending on your demographics, you may have multiple types of audience. With a retail furniture store, an audience could be segmented into those who have purchased before (returning customers) and those who have not (new customers). Messaging may be different for those who have never purchased before.
Similarly, the audience for high-end, luxury furniture may be different from the audience that wants affordable decor for their first home. It would be a waste of time sending tips for decorating on a budget to the first audience, while the second audience would have little interest in the more expensive items on the store’s catalog.
Segmenting the market improves the relevancy of the messages that each audience sees, making them more likely to continue to follow and engage.
6. Write Better Emails
You may not notice that typo, but your customers do. Take your time on the copy of your emails: a careless, casual email is going to be seen as unprofessional to your customers. You aren’t talking to just one customer, you’re talking to hundreds or even thousands.
Not only do you need to consider whether your text is clear and professional, but also whether it relates to your brand’s voice and whether it’s truly relevant to your customers. When in doubt, you want to be as concise as possible and appeal to your core marketing demographics. The more relatable your content is, the more likely customers are to engage.
7. Send Mobile-Friendly Emails
Recently, the number of individuals checking their email on a mobile platform exceeded the number of individuals checking their email on a desktop platform. The majority of your customers are going to be using mobile devices; your emails need to be mobile-friendly. Take some time to test your email on a mobile device: the last thing you want is too small text and images straining their eyes.
Ideally, your emails should be responsive: they should look great on any screen and any platform. There are software solutions you can use to automatically view your emails (and your websites) on a number of different platforms, to make sure they are readable on each.
8. Understanding Email Campaign Data
When your email marketing campaign goes out, it’s going to return a ton of data to you. It’ll tell you how many people received your email, read your email, clicked on links in your email, and so forth. If you’re using an integrated marketing solution, it may even be able to tell you how many people went on to make a purchase from you. if you have a brick-and-mortar store, you may need to directly track who visited your shop and when — and whether they had heard about your website, email newsletter, and social media attempts.
Here are some of the most common marketing metrics:
- Unsubscribe rates
- Bounce rates
- Open rates
- Click rates
- Unique open rates
- Unique click rates
- Forward rates
- Skim rates
Paying attention to your data is the only way to determine whether your strategy is working.
9. Using A/B Testing Emails
It’s not easy to come out of the box and know immediately how to make an email campaign successful. That’s why there is A/B testing. A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a method by which you attempt multiple marketing campaigns with small changes. Essentially, you can try a few things at once to see what works better. In so doing, you find the campaign that will work most effectively. You continue testing this campaign with changes until you pare down to the campaign variables that are most effective.
Consider four emails that link to the same article, but have different subject lines and email bodies. Running these four emails at the same time will tell you which subject lines are best at getting customers to open emails and which email bodies are most likely to get an email read.
When combined with the right metrics, this testing can give you some very important insights. An email subject line could lead to vastly more email opens, but could also lead to more people bouncing from your link without reading it — a compelling subject line that doesn’t deliver what it said it would.
Common things to test include: subject lines, email bodies, calls to action, times of day, and email frequency.
A/B testing is important because it isn’t always possible to determine, right at the outset, what the most popular campaign will be. There are some things that test well with audiences and other things that don’t; if marketers could always tell right away, there would be no need for focus groups.
The process of A/B testing continues throughout a successful email marketing campaign, as these preferences may also drift with time.
10. Track Email Campaigns
Finally, if you’re going to learn how to make an email campaign successful, you need to master the tracking. As your campaign progresses you should continue to track everything associated with your marketing campaign. This includes online sales, physical sales, website visits, social media followers — everything that connects to your email marketing campaign. Within the email marketing campaign itself, you need to be tracking which emails are opened and which ones aren’t, and which ones lead to conversions how to make an email campaign successful and which ones don’t.
Any digital marketing strategy includes email as one of the major components to the strategy — but email doesn’t operate in a vacuum. To truly rank your email campaign’s success, you need to be tracking its influence on other areas of your digital marketing campaign as well.
If you’re wondering how to make an email campaign successful, the above tips are the place to start. An email marketing campaign has a low barrier-to-entry and is one of the most successful types of online marketing campaign to run. If you’re going to start with one type of strategy, an email marketing campaign is often the best choice. With the above tips, you should be able to create a campaign that will draw potential customers in, educate them about your brand, and ultimately get them to commit. Maybe you’re just learning how to build an email list or you’re not sure where to start. We’re here to give you more tips on growing your email blasts to bring more customers to the store. Sign up for our newsletter or request a time to speak with a digital marketing expert in Charlotte.