Email marketing campaign remains one of the most effective tools to promote your business and increase your website’s traffic, leads, and sales, but getting started can be daunting.
If you’re not sure about Email Marketing, check out our other article.
Here are some simple steps to set up your first Email Marketing Campaign.
- Set measurable goals
- Determine your target audience
- Source contacts and build target lists
- Segment your email list
- Write enticing content
- Create Email Designs
- Focus on developing a good subject line
- Generate an actionable call to action
- Test your email before sending
- Start your campaign and monitor it along the way
1. Set measurable goals
Different kinds of email marketing have their own distinct goals. That’s why the first thing you have to do is to decide what you want to achieve and accomplish in your email marketing. For example, the Promotional Email Campaign aims to drive sales and conversions, and the Outreach Email Campaign intends to increase brand awareness.
Here are some questions that could help determine your email marketing’s purpose:
- Why do you want to set up your email marketing campaign?
- What is the objective?
- What are your goals?
- What is your priority?
Once you have the answers to those questions, set up measurable performance indicators. Some of the examples are:
- Increase Open Rates by 10% in 6 months
- Drive conversion rates by measuring the reply rates and meetings arranged
It doesn’t matter what your goal is as long as it’s measurable, logical, relevant and attainable. By documenting and discussing them with your team members, you’ll get to see the improvements over time.
2. Define and determine your target audience
After you decide on your goal, you’ll have to determine who your target audiences are. Some of the questions that could help you are:
- Who are your brand’s target customers?
- Who would be interested in your products?
- Who can benefit from your email marketing?
Create a customer profile and determine their personality and interests. This helps you to understand who your audience is and what they want to see from you. With this knowledge, you will be able to create more relevant and attractive email content.
3. Source contacts and build target lists
Subsequently, you’ll want to start building your company’s email lists. Now it may be a time-consuming step, but it is very crucial. There are 2 ways to source contacts and build your target audience list.
i) Email Finder Softwares
If you’re a B2B company and you want to run a Cold Email Campaign, one of the ways to get the email address of your target clients is through Email Finder Software such as Apollo.io.
With this software, you could choose what kind of business email you would like to obtain. For example, you get to select a business’s location, industry, number of employees, etc. This allows you to gather more specific and relevant email lists.
ii) Signup Box
On the other hand, if you’re a B2C brand, you could opt for a signup box placed at your brand website or social media. Be sure to offer something valuable in return to get more signups. For instance, free coupons, discounts or e-books.
4. Segment Your Email List
So now you know your target customers and have got their contacts, the next big thing is to segment your email list based on their interests or purchase history.
| B2B | B2C |
| Geography Job Position Department Industry | Geography Demographics Purchase history Interest Buyer Behaviour |
This step lets you send highly relevant and targeted emails to your audience. The more the readers get to relate to the email, the higher the open rates.
5. Write Enticing Content
Personal and insightful story-telling emails are the best and could generate higher open and reply rates. Therefore, it’s best to take time in creating quality email content that is aligned with your brand personality & voice, is memorable and engages readers. This may include interesting stories of “why choose you”, brand origins and rapport-building snippets.
Some key takeaways to note down are:
- Keep your stories short & sweet
- Write like you’re talking to an important friend
- Insert interesting anecdotal stories
6. Create Email Designs
Email Marketing Designs can be tricky; on one hand, you want beautiful & enticing designs to attract your recipients’ attention, on the other, fancy designs can trigger spam filters.
Here’s a suggestion: if you’re planning to set up email marketing for those who sign up and have given their consent, use fancy designs that better portray your brand. The reason is that these recipients have actively signed up for your newsletter and are expecting your email.
There are 4 options to create a memorable email design:
- Do it yourself from scratch
- Download Free Email Templates
- Buy Email Templates
- Work with an Email Designer
For Cold Email Marketing, nonetheless, it’ll be best to use plain text email as they look more natural to spam filters. Since this is your first time getting in touch with this group of recipients, you want to be genuine and authentic.
7. Focus on developing a good subject line
The subject line is the very first thing your prospect gets in contact with your email marketing. So, you want it to be catchy, attractive and clickable. So, you definitely need to arrange enough time to focus on developing a good subject line. If you don’t know where to start, you could check out “How to write a good subject line that boosts open rate?”
8. Generate an actionable call to action (CTA)
The biggest challenge for recipients after reading your email is to know what to do next. That’s where a call-to-action comes in. It should be clear, concise and accompanied by an offer or benefit that will motivate them to take action.
Here are some examples of CTAs:
- Read more about this topic here
- Call us now for a free consultation
- Purchase now to get this promo
9. Test your email before sending
Before you start implementing anything, a test run is always a crucial step!
This is true for anything from email campaigns to social media posts. A test run can help you identify any flaws or issues before they have the chance to negatively impact your business. It also gives you the opportunity to see how your email will look in different browsers and on various devices.
Thus, gather a list of your colleagues’ emails and run an email marketing campaign on them to check if things can go according to plan. Tweak and correct them before launching it officially.
10. Start your campaign and monitor it along the way
Finally, start your campaign! But, this is not the time to sit back and relax.
You need to monitor every email campaign from day one, to make sure everything is going smoothly.
In conclusion, if you incorporate these 10 simple tips, then you will be able to build yourself a successful email marketing campaign.
