Many companies think email marketing has become obsolete and social media marketing has taken over. 99 Firms conducted a study and found that 60% of consumers would still prefer receiving promotional emails and that 60% of email users have actually purchased from the company after receiving promotional emails. 

Therefore, those saying email is no longer relevant, think again.

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What is email marketing?

Not many companies are aware of what EXACTLY an email marketing campaign entails. Email marketing campaigns are a coordinated sequence of messages that a company will email out to its desired target audience for a specific reason. For example, your favourite brand has a newsletter, you subscribe to their newsletter by providing your email address and the company sends you a series of emails about their product offerings. It is important to note that if social media had to crash, a company can lose all its followers as the company does not own its followers. Email marketing allows a company to own their consumer emails and use them for promotional use. 

Now I am sure you are asking yourself, how do I do this for my business? Well, the answer is below.

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9 steps to email marketing campaigns

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​​1. Define Your Goals

Every business has a goal, the same should be for its email marketing campaigns. Defining clear goals can assist the marketing team to stay on track and track the progress. 

Before creating an email marketing campaign, the business needs to ask what it is that they are trying to accomplish. Is the intention of creating a new email marketing campaign to promote a product or service? Is it to increase audience engagement? Is it to increase downloads for a piece of content? 

Once the marketing team has decided on the objective of the email marketing campaign, it would be wise to create a SMART goal to identify the necessary key performance indicators the team is going to track which will determine how successful the campaign was.

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2. Define Your Offer

Once the marketing team has defined the goal, the next step is to settle on how the company is going to incentivize the consumer to complete the desired action. 

For example, if your company decides to run a new product email campaign, it would be wise to offer the email recipients a discount. To track how many of the consumers converted, a unique discount code can be embedded in the email exclusively for their use. 

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3. Create a targeted email list

Gone are the days of sending individual emails to each targeted consumer. Many companies use email marketing software to assist in creating email lists, scheduling emails, and analysing the results. A few popular email automation platforms include HubSpot, MailChimp, and SendinBlue. 

In the second step, identifying the consumer persona is important so that it helps to target the correct consumers, such as those people who have opted-in to receive emails from the brand.

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4. Consider a variety of email marketing campaigns types

With every objective, there are a variety of different email marketing campaigns marketers can use. A few common email marketing campaigns are:

Welcome emails: these are sent to new subscribers when they opt-in to receive your emails

Re-engagement campaigns: these are sent to consumers who have stopped engaging with the brand, the objective is to bring them back into the fold.

Post-purchase campaigns: these are sent to consumers who have made a recent purchase. The objective is to highlight similar offerings or ask the consumer to engage with the brand on social media.

Seasonal campaigns: these are sent at specific times of the year, such as Christmas-themed email campaigns. 

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5. The correct subject line and compelling copy

Considering all the steps before this, the marketing team should have the campaign goals down (the why), the offer (the what), and the targeted list of email recipients (the who). Now it is time to use your words to persuade. 

If the marketing team decides to create a series of emails, it is vital to plan out the copy for the entire series of the email marketing campaign in order to make sure the messages work cohesively. 

Piquing interest is vital, so the subject line should entice the audience to open the email. Running an A/B test on a subject line can be beneficial to see what works best. 

A call-to-action should tell your readers what to do next, which is directly related to the campaign goal. It is always important to have a clear and easy to see call-to-action. 

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6. Email Designs

A visually appealing email template can make it easy for the recipient to read and enjoy your email. Email designs should be considered as some trends may be vital to the success of the email marketing campaign. 

The email design should be consistent with the brand’s visual identity, but it does not have to match the rest of the marketing materials to the T. Rather, the reader should be able to recognise the brand based on the design. 

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7. Testing, Testing and Testing 

We always get so excited when we are about to launch a new campaign, but sending out test copies can help catch any grammatical errors, image sizing, email formatting and links not working before sending it off in masses. 

Marketers should consider sending the email to different email provides as the email may show up differently in each program, such as on Gmail compared to Outlook. 

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8. Schedule time

Like many marketing strategies, you want to ensure your message gets sent out to the target audience at the correct time. Consider your desired target audience and when they are most likely to check their inbox, do not forget to account for different timezones! 

Test out the best times, such as trying out two different time slots over a certain period of time. Remember the more emails you send, the more data you have to analyse and measure the results. Keep testing out the emails until your company is confident that you have found an optimal time to send emails to your consumers. 

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9. Track and measure results

Doing all this work and unsure if consumers are taking the bait? It is time to measure the actual performance of the email marketing campaign against the goals and key performance indicators set out in the early stages, this determines whether the campaign has been a success. 

Depending on the automation software that the marketing team used, the results that can be measured include open rate, click-through rate and more. These results can even be compared against the performance of previous campaigns. 

If the marketing team includes a unique tracking code per consumer, the results will show how many people converted from that specific email. 

If the marketing team and the company is unsatisfied with the performance of the campaign, consider what can be done differently for the next one and take notes of the different ways the optimise and adapt the campaign to meet marketing goals. 

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Conclusion

A strong email marketing campaign can provide the company’s consumers with a lot of value, while simultaneously pushing forward the overall marketing goals. Depending on the goal of the business, find an email campaign that suits your business and consumers. Be sure to remember:

•  Email campaigns have a specific objective and are targeted toward an audience segment for a certain time period, which makes them different from other marketing activities.
• There are a variety of email campaigns, so make sure to choose the one that makes the most sense for your email campaign objective. 
• Always test emails before sending them out, paying particular attention to the design and copy of the email.
• Track and measure the results of the email campaigns in order to optimise for future email campaigns.

Tags: digital marketing, email marketing, google, online marketing