Email marketing campaign is an email sent from a business to one or more customers or prospects. A successful email marketing campaign will get the recipients to take action, engage with your business, and help you to get more leads and sales.
One of the big advantages of Email marketing is that people still use email widely. In fact, as our article on why email marketing isn’t dead reveals, 90% of adults and 74% of teenagers still use email regularly.
Step 1: Determine Your Goals.
If you’re like me, then when you get an idea in your head, you’re eager to rush out and put it into action. Slow down there! If you want your campaign to be successful, you’ve got to step back and think about what you’re trying to accomplish.
- If your website earns money on ad impressions, you’re probably trying to drive traffic. Your emails will likely contain links to popular or recent content on your site.
- If you sell products in an ecommerce store, you might be trying to drive sales. In this case, your emails might link to best sellers, promote new merchandise, welcome new members, or reward loyal ones.
- If you’re looking to bring attention to a cause, you might send out a newsletter with human interest stories, current events, details on community activities, or requests for donations.
Step 2: Choose an Email Marketing Platform.
There are a few ways you can go about doing this. If your email marketing needs are fairly simple, it’s possible your CRM provides email marketing features that fit your needs. However, if you’re looking to build self-sustaining email marketing campaigns with email triggers and autoresponders, you’ll probably want a dedicated email marketing service provider.
Step 3: Build and Segment an Email List.
Your list may have humble roots with only a few subscribers, but prospects are prospects. It’s tempting to buy an email and bulk-send cold emails (hey, it works for some people), but you probably already have a fair number of contacts floating around in your records. If you choose to build an email list from scratch, there are ways to do that, too.
Step 4: Create a Campaign and Build an Email.
Creating a campaign is fairly straightforward in an Email marketing platform. There will usually be a page for campaigns; when you navigate to it, click the button that says ‘Create Campaign’ or something like it. There you go.
Depending on the provider, you’ll have a series of steps between this point and sending the email. You might need to choose recipients or a segmentation option. At some point, you’ll need to choose your template, which is where your creative juices can start flowing.
Whoops, now you’re staring at the template, wondering where to begin. Allow us to assist. Like roses on a trellis, sometimes artwork needs some structure.
Step 5: Enable Autoresponders.
Alright, so you created your first email. Nice! But of course, you already know there’s a lot more to an email campaign than the first email. It’s time to automate that baby.
Step 6: Enable Tracking.
Alright, we’re almost done! Tracking is the cherry on top of your email marketing sundae. Your emails are now configured to send responsively and at the pace of your choosing. How do you improve engagement and increase email conversions? Your good friend, the email tracker.
Tracking and obtaining performance analytics is how you optimize email campaigns and Email marketing assets based on what works with which segments. The possibilities are nearly endless, and you can adapt subject lines, preheader text, email templates, content design, calls to action, and landing pages through A/B tests and analysis over time.
Step 7: Send!
Congratulations! You’ve created an Email marketing campaign. Now it’s time to send your emails. You might hit a homerun on your first campaign, but don’t be discouraged if it’s a dud — we learn more from our failures than our successes. Segment your lists, study campaign performance, make alterations, test your emails against one another, and every day you’ll get a little closer to your goals.
