Email marketing has completely evolved when we compare it to the older generation. It has become more sophisticated and engaging. This creates room for marketers to introduce innovative marketing features. There are so many ways you can get customers through email. It is crucial to know how to create email marketing campaign for getting better results.
If we see the statistics, there are millions of emails getting transacted every day. This method has caused a headache for the audience. And this is also causing problems for marketers as well. Because to effectively reach your target audience, you need to stand unique from the crowd. This is where marketers use well-crafted techniques so that they can scale growth through email campaigns.
There are multiple ways you can achieve your business goals through email campaigns. The best thing about email marketing as you can easily measure the success of your campaign. The challenging factor lies in the way you can attract your audience, engage with them and convert them to prospective customers for your business. For all the above goals and objectives to be achieved, you need to execute effective email marketing campaigns.
In this post, you will learn how to create an email marketing campaign that drives better ROI for your business.
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How to create email marketing campaign?
Sending out an email marketing campaign is very easy, but getting better returns from the campaign is very hard. For driving a result-oriented email marketing campaign, you need to follow this step-by-step guide.
Step 1. Define objectives and goals for your email campaign
This is one of the basic steps that email marketers do before sending out an email campaign. Many of you are aware of how defining goals and objectives for your email campaign can be crucial.
You don’t need to hurry up, good email campaigns take time. Every successful email campaign has one strong foundation. That is defining the goals and objectives and aligning your email campaigns with them. When you are successful in doing this, you can easily streamline the entire marketing process.
You can go back to your drawing board, forecast the metrics that you are going to achieve. As per that you need to design the email campaign and draft the content for it. Some of the goals that can be defined in email campaigns are mentioned below.
Promotional email campaign
If you are looking forward to promoting any product or service offered by your brand, you need to create email campaigns with respect to that. Some of the ideas that I can pitch in this strategy would be giving out promotional codes and vouchers. This will help in driving better conversion through this strategy.
Engaging with your audience
This is one of the basic processes where every company undertakes. Engaging with your audience is one of the best ways to build strong customer relationships. The engagement activities can be the recent updates on what your company is doing and the success stories that you can share with them. This will help in generating credibility and it helps in long-term association with your brand.
Nurturing leads
When you decide to nurture the leads that you already have at your database. You can set the goals and objectives as per that. Lead nurturing is one of the best ways to extract quality leads for your business. It helps to cut down the cost on which your sales team wastes lots of time.
Step 2. Segregate the audience
Depending upon the type of campaign you want to pitch in for your audience. You need to segregate the email list that you have. Because every type of email list will have its own goal. Based on the past activities that have been performed by the end-users, it helps in distinguishing the email list.
Some of the email lists can be broadly classified into newsletters, promotional, sales, and transaction-related email lists. When you can segregate the audience list on these categories, it will be easy for you to target the email campaign based on the type of audience.
Many marketers have committed this error while promoting. You don’t want to mess up your email campaigns by sending them out to the wrong email list. Cross-check multiple Times for the type of list that you have selected for email campaigns.
There are two major ways in which you can get the email list for campaigns.
1. Existing database
The existing database can be the email list that you already have. Every company will be having its own database somewhere or other. You need to dig deep to find the email list for your campaigns.
Talk to your colleagues
It can be based on the email marketing campaign that you used to do in the past or the recently generated email list. You can talk to your management and as well as your colleagues about whether they have a database that can be used for email promotion purposes.
Extract data from inbound applications
The data can also be extracted from the software that you are using for your company. It can be any chatbot for a CRM tool that is used to maintain the customer database. These are some of the good places where you can extract the source of email lists for your marketing purpose.
Check the database through accounting tools
You can also check your accounting software applications. Because this is a platform where you send invoices for your client and maintain the complete pipeline. Through this, you can easily get the relevant database for email marketing campaigns.
2. Start generating a database of your own
It is not always that you will be having the existing email database. Sometimes you need to work hard in generating an email database for your company. You do not need to panic because there are so many ways you can easily generate email lists for your business. But let me just make you aware that there are some efforts and budgets required to generate leads from scratch.
Get leads through the blogs
Generating leads through blogs is one of the effective ways that marketers do. Because this is a tried and tested technique where people have found better results. When you can create engaging blogs, you can easily trap the relevant set of target customers for your business.
Generate leads through social media channels
This is another way where you can easily generate leads for your business. As every business will be having its official social media channels, and there will be followers associated with it. You need to engage with your target audience and influence them to subscribe to your email list.
Execute sign up paid campaigns
The paid campaigns are a very broad term. But if I have to refine it, you can start executing ads through a search engine or even social media platform. These are the best ways to generate leads to build your email campaign list. The basic way to do this is that you can offer something that excites the audience.
Conduct surveys and polls
Surveys and polls are some of the best ways to generate an audience for your business. Many companies have used this strategy successfully and found better results. When you reach out to people asking about their thoughts and opinions regarding a product or a service, they will usually answer it. And through this way, you can influence them to sign up for your email database.
Conduct webinars and podcast
This strategy is basically found in B2B companies. You can see firms hosting webinars and podcasts to engage with a target audience that is relevant to their business. People are keen to know what industry leaders are talking about a particular subject. And through this, you can easily reach out to the untapped market and generate an audience for your email list.
Step 3. Select the email marketing software
You can find plenty of email marketing tools in the market. But depending upon the needs and expectations from the application is very important. You need to ascertain the goals and you need to align with the solutions that you are getting from the email marketing platform. In this way, you can create email campaigns that drive you better results.
Some of the features that can be measured and categorized would be the email triggers, type of landing page customization, and autoresponders that they provide. These factors heavily influence your email campaign and the budget which is allocated for it.
If there is a huge quantity of emails that you need to send every day, then it would be recommended that you directly approach the email service provider to get the best deals. As you can completely create a custom domain based on the list of your email and can send easily millions of emails through that method.
Some of the features that you need to look forward to before selecting the email marketing software.
1. Email design customization
Not everyone is a graphic designer or UI developer. There are marketers who do not have any tech skills expertise. For that purpose, there are email marketing applications designed for them. The platform is completely user-friendly so that you can easily design your email cover. They also provide you customizable templates which makes it easy for email marketing campaign to use the platform.
One of the major features that you need to watch out for is the drag and drop builder. This is one of the most convenient ways where you can design an email template based on your choice.
2. Track insights of your campaign
When you proceed to purchase an email marketing platform, always see that the provider gives you a dashboard for analytics purposes. Checking insights into your campaign is one of the productive ways to measure the effectiveness of your emails. When you can effectively track the performance of your email campaigns, you will start to get better ideas and you can optimize the campaign for better results.
3. Integrations
Check whether the email Marketing software has an integration feature. Because this is one of the essential ways to automate your email marketing campaigns and segregate the database accordingly. If you are using any CRM tool, you can easily configure the platform with your email marketing application. There are some email marketing platforms where you can easily integrate with CMS platforms. This will make your tasks easier when you can segregate the database according to the niche.
4. Customer support
Many marketers fail to understand the value of this function. Because the email marketing platform is integrated with multiple tools and applications. And sometimes the application breaks down, you will start to panic for whom to reach. This is where the customer support team comes into the picture. Because they can listen to your opinions and escalate the issue as soon as possible. When the issue gets resolved, you can ensure the campaign doesn’t have any glitch. So you need to always prefer an email marketing application that has a good customer support team.
5. Autoresponders
Autoresponders help you to completely automate your email campaign. Functions that are termed as Triggers can act on the basis of the action you select. Autoresponder is one of the best ways to qualify your leads and get the data that matters for your business. And based on the activities demonstrated by the end-user, you can easily customize the email campaign as per those factors. This even heavily influences your email marketing campaign sales funnels if you are focusing on it.
Step 4. Create your email campaign
Based on the goals and objectives of your email campaign, now it’s time to create the email campaign. Ensure that you always stick to the KPIs of your campaign. Because this is the only way that can guide you to getting better results.
Before you directly create a campaign, you need to allocate the resources to the relevant team. Let’s assume that your team has designers as well as content writers. Based on the nature of the email campaign, you need to assign the related resources to the particular team.
You need to check whether both the departments are perfectly aligned with your goals and objectives. The ideal way to proceed is to state your objectives and requirements clearly for your team. Help them to understand what you want to achieve from this email campaign.
1. Designing the email layout
Before you send out any email campaigns, the designs should be compelling enough. Because this is the only way where you can make your audience find email interesting. When you invest so much time in developing such engaging content and if it has not been properly represented. Then your complete campaign goes in vain. So you always need to ensure that the email design meets all the latest standards.
If you see the best email designs, they are composed of minimal text and images. When you are able to coordinate between these designs, it will even create a responsive email template that can be easily accessible from their laptop or mobile device. Using relevant images based on the content is one of the best ways to boost the exposure of your email campaign.
Below are some of the tips for you to design an engaging email.
Use your brand colours
This is one of the basic ways that you need to proceed prior to designing an email. The colours are one of the major visual identities for customers to distinguish your brand from the competitors. Always ensure that your design guidelines are meeting the email draft.
When you look at the standardized format of email layout, you need to use a maximum of up to three colours. Usage of more than three colours will confuse the end-user and the engagement factor will decrease.
Highlight colours wherever required
This can be on the text where you want to make your audience focus on the relevant content. Based on this requirement, you need to convey your designers to develop the required style. Highlighting is one of the best ways to make your audience capture attention from the email. This can be based on the headlines that you want to focus on or it can even be the statistics.
Use appropriate Colours for the CTA
CTA is one of the major elements to drive conversions for email campaigns. When your team has designers or when it comes to you designing personally, always ensure that usage of proper CTA colours is more effective to drive conversions. There are so many reports where bloggers have suggested that just by changing the colour factor, they have received better responses. You can also try this strategy by creating the A/B technique of email campaigns.
2. Structuring content for your email
When you have defined the goals for your email campaign, it is very easy for you to get the content for it. You can outsource the content or develop the content by yourself. It’s all up to you. When you are developing the content for email, you need to follow the basic guidelines that have been mentioned below.
Define the username for the email
Based on the type of email campaign, you need to plan for what username you need to select for promotional activities. Username is something that gets displayed on the name section whenever your audience opens your email. Depending on the type of campaign, you need to decide whether you have to go ahead with using generic usernames or personalized email names.
If you use personal email names, this is one of the best ways to engage with your target audience. But there is a downside to it. You won’t be able to generate credibility or connect with your target audience.
When you use your company’s official usernames, it will be very easy for you to connect with the target audience. If we see the downside of it, you will not be able to create a personalized experience as the audience perceives that the email marketing campaign is sending out in bulk.
Come up with an engaging subject line
When you are able to state a creative subject line, 50% of your marketing campaign efforts get achieved. Because the subject line is the only thing that can make your audience open your email. When you don’t create an engaging subject line, then all the effort gets wasted as you spend so much time on designing and drafting the body content.
It’s not that if you create a good design and content will help to get better results. The subject line is one of the ways to make your audience access emails. The subject line is generally limited to under 50 characters. So it is a challenging task for marketers to come up with a creative subject line.
Always try to convey your brand message to your audience. This is the only way where you can make your audience open your email. It also depends on the type of username that you are using for email campaigns.
You can spice things up a bit. By using clickbait headlines, you can easily capture the attention of the end-user. The best way to go around it would be performing A/B test campaigns for the effectiveness of your subject lines.
Try to brainstorm subject lines with your team. You can also ask opinions and thoughts from your fellow colleagues so that you will get better ideas. This is what people do to come up with an engaging subject line for their email campaigns.
Develop content for the body text
This is the main part of your email marketing campaign. If you want to attract the end-user, you need to have engaging content so that they find it useful. By developing the content in a short way and the message should be delivered precisely. These are some of the overview components for delivering better email content.
Address your audience with their personal name
There are so many statistics that have been found when marketers address their audience using personalized names which creates better results. You can try to experiment on yourself. Let’s assume that you received an email and that email has your name written on it. Won’t you find this method interesting? This is the same way that you can replicate this process for your audience as well.
Make a story
The story should be relevant to your business. This should be relatable for an audience so that they can connect with your brand. When you can talk to your subscribers that can make them visualize the things they want to convey to them, it helps to create a sense of the content that you have written. As your audience will be receiving tons of emails, it will be better for you to find a way where you can connect with them emotionally.
Represent it with facts and statistics
When you develop content, always ensure that you represent it with facts and statistics. This is one of the ways to create the authenticity of your email content. And a lot of marketers have found this technique productive. Because the statistics are something that derives the benefit that they are going to achieve from the type of content that you are going to promote for them.
Use simple language
When you are sending an email campaign, always see that you use plain and simple English. Because the usage of complex words in your email content will confuse the audience. The language and the tone that you use for the email campaign should be subtle and easy to understand.
Represent it with pictures
Pictures are one of the best ways that can boost your content relevancy. When you use images or video within the email content, it heavily influences the engagement factor. Try to use an image that is of less weight, so that it can load quicker in your email. Always prefer to use an image that is clear and easy to observe.
Embed with the proper CTA
CTA is one of the best ways to track conversions of your campaign. Because this is a major factor that acts as a navigation for the next move to be taken by the end-user. You can even use CTA across the email body content so that it is easily accessible for them to reach the target location.
Complete the final phase of your email content
This is the final phase that influences your audience’s perspective. Do not try to ignore the fact that this section is not required for your audience. As these are some of the factors that can help in decision-making for them to take any action on your email. This also generates trust and boosts the credibility of the content that you have developed for the email.
Furnish your email with contact details and social media links
Always ensure that you insert the contact details at the end of your email. Because this is one of the major factors that influence your audience’s perspective. This not only targets the audience but also so is one of the major guidelines from the email marketing platform. Without contact details, the email marketing campaign platform will not allow you to execute the email campaign.
Social media links can be linked to your official channels. Through this technique, you can even generate followers for your social media platform. This also helps in engaging with your target audience.
Create a feature for unsubscribing
If you have to follow the email marketing campaign guidelines, you need to mandatorily include an unsubscribe feature on your email. Because as per the recent trends, there have been many reports found that the people are getting spammed heavily. Even the federal laws are taking an active role in this method. And the email Marketing software doesn’t allow you to proceed with the campaign without an unsubscribing button.
Step: 5Track the performance of your campaign
This is one of the important steps that no email marketer should miss. Sending the email campaign is easy, but checking the effectiveness of your campaign is something that helps you to get insights into your other email campaigns.
Tracking the performance of your campaign can be anything. It can be checking the effectiveness of your subject lines, CTAs, design of your email content, and as well as the content that is used for body text. There are multiple ways in which you can check the analytics and insights of your campaigns.
All the activities can be easily tested through A/B testing. This is one of the major ways where marketers used to test the effectiveness of their email campaigns.
For this to happen, you need to configure your tracking features on email campaigns correctly. Because there are some tracking mechanisms that you need to use to keep it in place so that you can get insights into your email campaign.
Below are some of the factors that will give you insights into your email campaign.
Unsubscribe rate
These are the set of individuals who unsubscribed from the newsletter when they got your email to their inbox. The reason for unsubscribing can completely vary based on the type of list that you have generated for the campaign. This can also depend upon the authenticity of your content and as well as relevance. But if we are considering the overview factor, the unsubscribe rates are generally low. So you need not panic about this feature and develop content that is relevant for the email list.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is a factor that arises when you send an email to the email recipient that doesn’t exist. This can be happening due to the email server of the recipient as well. Bounce rate is one of the major factors that affect the effectiveness of your email campaign.
Recently several applications have been introduced to check the authenticity of your email lists. This will easily let you know the wrong recipient and if there are any server issues with the recipient’s email ID. The downside of this strategy would be the server where you check the database and it captures all the details of your email lists. Depending upon your requirement, you need to take the step in validating this feature.
Open rate
The open rate is one of the major metrics where marketers analyze the performance of their campaigns. This gives you a major Insight as to how many users have opened your email when they have received it. It also gives other subsidiary results like how many of the open rates are unique, multiple times opened, and as well as the total open rate.
Click-through rate
Click-through rates are popularly known as CTR. This is a metric that allows you to track how many people have clicked the number of links from your email. If you have received multiple Clicks on your email, that means you got a better response. This at the end results in a good through rate for your email campaign.
Total number of shares
You can even track the performance of your email campaign whenever the recipient from your email list shares your content. Basically whenever the user has forwarded your email to their peer group or can even be the social media channels. The email automation platform will let you know the results.
Spam accusations
If any end-user from your email list marks your email as spam, then it is one of the major concerning factors. Because this can directly lead to your email account getting blocked, or whatever email that you send lands in the spam folder of their inbox. This can heavily influence the performance of your campaign.
To sum it up
Now when you have understood how to create an email campaign. It’s up to you to deliver greater outcomes. You need to consistently optimize the campaigns as this is the only way to achieve higher ROI through this strategy.
Based on the insights of your email campaign performance, you need to remove irrelevant email recipients from the audience list. Also, try experimenting with changing the design layout and the subject lines as well. These are some of the activities that email marketers have used to achieve a more elevated reach for their campaign. Post this you can resend the email campaigns creating a positive impact.
Evaluating the insights and performance is one of the best ways to get better results. Try to use the autoresponder whenever it is needed. As you can completely automate the email marketing campaign process. This will help you to save time as well as focus on things that matter.
Further, read:
Why email marketing is important?