How to Successfully Run an Email Marketing Campaign

The world of email marketing is a fun one, provided you know your onions. It’s that straightforward, although there is some twist and turns along the way. But emails are worth it.

Consider the figures from Statista showing that about 281.1 billion emails are sent per day.

The fact is almost every web user owns an email address. They communicate with their friends, family and use it for official purposes.

Again, nearly every business out there requires emails on some customer forms.

It’s that important, so you should be doing enough to hit the ground running with perfect email marketing campaigns.

With email, there’s a lot you can achieve, including engaging with people and building a solid relationship with prospects.

That said, this article will give you an expert feel on how you can run a successful email marketing campaign.

Table of Contents

What Is an Email Marketing Campaign?

An email marketing campaign simply refers to emails sent from a business to customers or prospects.

Mind you; the number can range from one person to millions of people.

Moreover, a successful email marketing campaign is one designed to get the recipients to take action by engaging with your business.

That way, you get much-needed assistance to get more leads and sales.

People still go about using emails. That much is clear and stands as one of the strongest suits of email marketing.

To further buttress just how much email marketing is alive, 90% of adults and 74% of teenagers still use email regularly.

As such, a good campaign can boost your leads and sales all at the same time.

The Importance of Email Marketing

Now you know what email marketing means. Perhaps you need to learn more about just how important it is for your business.

There’s no disputing that the rise of social media has contributed to the world of business and marketing strategies.

However, email still trumps both as the most effective way to nurture leads and boost customer loyalty.

In line with that, here are the top reasons why email marketing must not be taken lightly.

a) The conversion is better with emails.

For example, products marketed through email stand a better chance of being bought than those without email offers.

Also, there’s more ROI associated with email marketing which stands at about 4400%.

That’s a colossal figure in comparison to social media. Yes, social media does its bit to convert, yet the average order value of any email surpasses it.

b) Email is still rated as the number one communication channel.

Ponder this: about 99% of consumers check their email daily. Simply put, no other communication channel does this.

c) Your list belongs to you.

It’s that easy.

Whatever social media platform you use, your account (including all your fans and posts) could be suspended at any time and without notice to you.

With your email list, that’s not the case because no one can take those leads away from you.

Having said all that, it’s time to consider the steps to land a fantastic and successful email marketing campaign.

1) Start With Your List

Want to start an email marketing campaign? Great! However, you can’t send one out without having anyone to send them to.

Note that email marketing won’t work if you don’t have an excellent group to send emails to.

Then you need to come up with a list.

Capture leads

Capturing leads is the way to grow your email list with your target audience.

There are many tools to help you do that, including OptinMoster.

According to some sources, OptinMoster stands at number one of lead generation software.

You can use them to make a wonderful optin campaign with no expert skills required.

You can also use highly advanced targeting tools to drastically grow your list with quality leads and see considerable increases in your company’s profits.

Further, OptinMonster can integrate with more than 30 of the most popular email service providers out there.

At no point will you feel stranded.

2) Set Your Goals

You can’t get ahead of the competition if you don’t know how you’re going to beat them.

In the same way, good marketing always begins with setting goals. The same thing applies to email marketing campaigns.

You have to think about what you want to achieve and work accordingly.

Some of the typical goals for an email marketing campaign include:

You can start by giving an exciting and welcoming experience to new subscribers. Let them know about your business, values, and what they stand to gain. It’s all part of a relationship-building process.
Boost engagement with your content and your business. It could be an initial sale or promotional content.
Dont forget existing subscribers. Nurture them by providing more value.
Re-engage subscribers who have a fall by the wayside or become inactive.
Segment your subscribers to have a more targeted approach to marketing.

Those are great pointers to follow, and you can always set marketing goals according to your conversion goals.

3) Have an Understanding of Email Types

It’s only normal that with concepts as broad as email marketing, there will be types.

As a result, it makes sense to understand the different types of emails you can send.

Let’s have a look at some groupings of the types available today.

1) Promotional emails. These ultimately deal with offers and sales. They’re primarily self-promotional.

2) Relational emails. These give subscribers what you promised.

For example, a gift, coupon, and a weekly newsletter are options. Besides that, you can provide relevant information to them.

3) Transactional emails. These are usually triggered by subscribers’ actions and how they relate to actions they take on your site. They include:

Welcome messages
Order or purchase confirmation
Subscriber signup confirmation
Acknowledgments of changes to subscriber information

4) Get to Know Your Audience

If email marketing isn’t new to you, then you know your audience, or at least know who they should be.

You are allowed some educated guesses if you don’t know them. That way, you can target your content ideally.

Key information

What you can do is start collecting subscribers’ info immediately after you send your first campaign.

It will help you next time around with actual data to work with.

You can now put together data from Google Analytics and your social media profiles, including Facebook Insights data and other platforms.

You’ll also find that some other sources have data on demographics, location, and interests. Other metrics follow, too.

These serve to give you an idea of who your customers are and what they’re interested in.

That’s a step in the right direction for a successful email marketing campaign.

5) Use Technology Wisely

There are great email marketing tools you can tag as the best out there.

They’re available to help you create more successful email marketing campaigns.

To that end, you can look for features like:

Easy campaign creation and automaton with stuff like templates and workflow.
How the tools integrate with already existing software like WordPress.
Ways you can segment your audience.
In-depth analytics on email campaign performance.

A tool like Mailchimp can help you do all these. But if you have other features you consider better, other alternatives exist.

What you get is the ability to schedule transactional emails and receive blog-driven updates.

They’ll also help you offer quick responses to customers as well as deliver promotional and relational emails.

You’ll be on the right track to building a successful email marketing campaign.

6) Planning Emails and Followups

This is quite the step. After knowing the goals you want to pursue, the email type, and audience, couple with people you’ve attracted to your list, you can plan your email marketing campaign.

You’ll get the idea of how to create winning emails.

Take note of this:

Be mindful of the email frequency
Take note of the type of email
Get a sketch of the content
Be clear on the type of action you want subscribers to take, including following you on social media or buying a product.

The best thing when creating your emails is to make sure they’re timely, relevant, engaging, and valuable.

Sometimes, like many brands out there, you can use a short email series to welcome customers and introduce your products to them.

Using software helps.

You can set up your software to help with key tasks that show your list how serious you are about meeting their needs.

7) Create Great Optins

We can’t hammer home enough the point that you need to get people on your email list for a successful campaign.

That can mean creating attractive optin forms to grab the attention. Such forms also encourage people to sign up for your list and services.

To that end, you’re free to experiment with different types of optin forms on other parts of your site.

You can try the following:

Welcome gates. These appear when prospects arrive on your site. Optimize the pages so that people find it easy to reach the content they want to see.
Use pop-ups where necessary. These help to attract users and often convert very well.
Exit-intent pop-up. These come up when people are about to leave your website. It’s also a perfect time to offer your lead magnet.

If you want to get exciting results, out optins in many places. You can also choose how they appear with rules or page-level targeting.

It helps keep your site and efforts within reason. The last thing you want annoying a prospect.

8) Craft Your Subject Line Like a Pro

Whether you’re a newbie or expert in email marketing, you can craft subject lines like a pro.

It’s also a great starting point if you must achieve a successful email marketing campaign.

The subject line often sets the tone for the rest of the email.

Getting the clicks and open

Your subject line plays a vital role in determining whether people open and clicks on your emails.

Think of it this way, the headlines of your blog post have to be catchy. The same thing goes for the subject line of your emails.

When you get it right, you capture their attention to take further actions.

Don’t Overthink Things.

We know you always want to get it right with emails. However, it would be best if you were mindful of stuffing many words in your bid to make an impression.

Stats also show that most subject lines contain between 41 to 50 characters.

Rather than try to cram a lot, focus on putting essential parts at the beginning.

You can try the following to improve your business email’s subject lines:

Tell people what they stand to gain when they open your emails. There’s no need to be too clever or witty about it. But if that’s your brand’s personality, that’s okay.
If you want your email to reach inboxes, do your best to avoid spam trigger words.
Add hints of personalization to the subject. For example, you can include people’s names in the subject line to keep them comfortable and engaged.
Take a hint from the best. You can borrow from high-converting email subject lines before adapting them for your email marketing campaign.

9) Go on and Write the Copy

If you’ve done everything above, it’s time to write your email marketing copy.

It’s always essential to create some hook right at the beginning so that people keep reading.

In line with that, we advocate for email marketing copies that are short.

Besides that, don’t pitch your offer too early. Get comfortable with your subscribers before doing so.

Get personal

When you start, address subscribers by name. We already mentioned the benefits of personalized emails. They’re more successful.

To execute, ensure you personalize your business emails based on the need to meet different user expectations.

That makes them have a targeted and segmented feel. That can boost your click-through rate by up to 50%.

Consider the following for your email copy:

Use a personal story. This can give you an emotional connection with the prospect.
You are offering something of value. Give your audience helpful something to look forward to. It can be helpful to information or the resource you’re promoting.
Use a poll, graphic, or survey. These are proven ways to keep readers engaged.
Let your copy be short with only a couple of main points within each one. Even if you decide to go longer, make your email scannable.
Include a good Call to Action. It’s the last part of your email marketing copy, so it should reflect what you want people to do after reading your email.

On the whole, the best CTAs are short and precise. Subscribers will enjoy clinking your link when you provide a clear and informative email copy.

10) Give Focus to Email Marketing Design

In this digital age, email design matters in any successful email marketing campaign.

If your emails look terrible, they will reflect poorly on you. Moreover, people will stop reading and usher the email to the junk box.

Stats also show that more people than ever are reading emails on mobile devices.

That makes it imperative to use a responsive email template. That way, your email resizes automatically on mobile, tablet, or desktop platforms.

Get creative

Generally, many emails have more text than images. With images, you’ve got the chance of having a more attractive email.

However, many people disable images. Even with that, your email still has to work when people can’t see those images.

What to do?

You shouldn’t hide information in images. It could end badly for email accessibility.

Also, don’t forget to use Alt tags to describe images.

That way, part of your audience that has them disabled still knows what they’re supposed to see.

Another tip is making a superb description. When your audience sees such a description, they’ll go ahead and enable images.

That will give your emails a better look.

11) Test and Track

On a Fina note, sending your email is just the first step in achieving email marketing success.

If you want to have perfect results, collect data to improve future campaigns.

To do that, you have to test and track everything. That includes design and layout, email marketing copy, subject lines, and calls to action.

More tests

You can also consider testing emails with different segments while also experimenting with email send times.

If you’re keen on results, you can also monitor your service provider’s email analytics concerning opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and forwards.

When you do so, you’ll be able to figure out what’s working and what’s not with email marketing.

Your reputation is on the line.

One other thing you can monitor is your sender’s reputation. This affects email deliverability.

One email marketing error to avoid at all cost is sending messages upon messages only to end up in the junk box of your subscribers.

Some platforms help you identify red flags that might stop your business emails from reaching your subscriber’s inboxes.

Conclusion

These are significant steps to help you create the best and most successful email marketing campaigns.

Ensure that you tailor your services to customer’s preferences.

Email marketing is far from dead. You only need to use it correctly to get good results.