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Important Things You Need to Know to Run a Successful Email Marketing Campaign
Understanding these essential aspects of email marketing will help you get started on the right track to creating a successful marketing campaign for your business.
Know Your Goals
All good marketing strategies start with setting goals, and email marketing is no different. To run a successful email marketing campaign, you need to think about what it is you want to achieve. Here are some typical goals for an email marketing campaign.
- Welcoming new subscribers
- Boosting engagement
- Nurturing existing subscribers
- Re-engaging subscribers
- Segmenting your subscribers
You can create your email marketing goals according to your overall conversion goals.
Understanding the Different Email Types
Along with knowing your goals, you also have to understand the different types of emails that you can send out. While people group these in different ways, here are the three critical types of emails.
- Promotional emails – these emails talk about sales and offers and are self-promotional.
- Relational emails – these give subscribers what you’ve promised them, like a gift, weekly newsletter, or relevant information that they can use.
- Transactional emails – these include subscriber signup confirmations, welcome messages, order or purchase confirmations
- Acknowledgments of changes to subscriber information and are usually triggered by a subscriber’s actions.
Know Your Audience
If you’re just getting started with email marketing, then you’re going to have to make some educated guesses if you want to target your content. After you send out your first campaign, you’ll start to be able to collect subscriber information so you’ll have better data to work with for your next campaign. You can gather data from Google Analytics or Facebook Insights to get demographics, interests, locations, and other pertinent information to give you a better snapshot of your audience.
Use the Right Technology
The best email marketing services that you can use will have tools that will help you create more successful email marketing campaigns. Some of the features that you want to look for are, easy campaign creation and automation, integrations with software you already use, ways to segment your audience, and in-depth analytics on the performance of your email campaigns.
Must-Have Components of an Email Marketing Campaign
Email marketing has always been a powerful marketing channel, and automation makes the entire process lot more effective, faster, and smarter. If you want to continue to see a positive ROI, then your campaign must be done right.
If you want to run a successful email marketing campaign, then you need to ensure that these must-have components are included in every campaign you send out.
A Plan
You have to have a plan in place before you can even start your email marketing campaign. You need to create a content strategy that includes topics that are relevant to your audience. They should be topics that are based on their interests. To ensure that you keep on schedule, create a content calendar that outlines the release dates for each campaign.
Best Performing Subject Lines
The subject lines that you include in your emails will significantly influence open rates. You want to avoid confusing, generic, misleading, and over-the-top subject lines. Make the subject lines short, informative and to the point for the best results. The subject line should set reader expectations and provide them with the jist of the email. Refrain from using all caps and spammy keywords like “free,” “gift,” and “bonus.”
Personalization
Personalizing your emails is one of the easiest ways to stand out in your subscribers’ inboxes. Sending personalized emails will help to build trust in the mind of your audience. A simple personalization trick, like addressing readers by their first name, can prove to be incredibly useful. It has been shown that by personalizing everything from the subject line to the products offered, can help to increase click-through rates, which can lead to a significant increase in revenue.
Segmentation
When it comes to successful marketing strategies, one-size-doesn’t-fit all. Email marketing focuses on getting subscribers to take action, and it requires you to have a solid understanding of your recipients. Knowing your audience better can help you create segments that will allow you to tailor content to each subscriber, which will ensure better engagement.
Mobile Optimization
Sending out a non-responsive email will appear outdated on a mobile device and tablets. With more and more people opening their emails on their smartphones and tablets, mobile optimization needs to become a natural part of the process. If you want to run a successful email marketing campaign, make sure you are optimizing your emails for mobile phones and tablets.
Best Ways to Improve Your Email Marketing Open Rates
While many people may think that email marketing is dead, it still has one of the highest engagement rates of any marketing strategy. Plus, with an average return of $44.25 for every $1 spent, email marketing also has one of the highest returns on investment. The key to taking advantage of this is to find a way to stand out from the crowd. One easy way to figure out if your efforts are paying off is to pay attention to the open rates of your email campaigns.
These are some of the best ways to ensure your emails get opened. If you want to run an email marketing campaign that is successful, then you need to work on increasing your open rates.
Create an Engaging Subject Line
The first thing that consumers see on any emails is the subject line. If you haven’t tested and optimized yours, then you are leaving money on the table. A/B testing isn’t just for your landing pages and websites; it is also an essential part of your email marketing. You want to aim for creating a casual and personal opening line.
Write Quality Content
If your customers come to expect your business to send engaging, entertaining, and informative emails, you’ll see a substantial increase in your open rates. However, if you are sending information that they can find elsewhere, or you send them nothing but promotional emails, your messages will end up in the trash bin. One of the best ways to keep your open rates high is by sending high-quality emails less frequently.
Send at the Right Time
In marketing, timing is everything. This is especially true when it comes to email marketing. You want to make sure that you are sending emails at the best times based on the audience, message, and intent. You can do some testing to find this out, or you can do your research on the industry to determine the typical results.
Avoid Spam Filters
The filters on email servers are becoming more and more sophisticated, and if your emails end up in subscribers’ spam folders, you’ll see your open rate plummet. If you want to stay out of spam folders, then you need to make sure you avoid sending emails that look like spam. Limit the number of links in your message and make sure it doesn’t read like a brochure.
Mistakes to Avoid in Your Email Marketing Campaign
These days, most businesses have an email marketing strategy. However, with more than 294 billion emails sent every day, it is crucial for your business to stand out from the crowd. The last thing you want to do is spend your time and effort on creating an email campaign only to have your emails go unread. Avoiding these five mistakes can ensure that your email marketing campaign is successful. Email is still the most preferred communication channel for most customers, so creating an effective email campaign will help you out-perform the competition.
Sending Your Emails from a donotreply@yourdomain.com
Sending your emails from a donotreply or noreply email is incredibly unwelcoming and uninviting. Don’t be shocked if your open rate is low is you send your emails from one of these addresses. You always want to make sure you are sending emails from an address that your customers can reply to if they have issues or questions.
Sending Image Only Based Emails
Only about 33 percent of email subscribers will have their images turned on by default. This means that nearly two-thirds of your subscribers will not be able to read your email, but instead be faced with a long, empty box. Plus, text-only emails have a 40 percent higher click-through rate than those that contain only images. If you do decide to use pictures, make sure that you repeat everything in simple text.
Not Linking to Your Website
The entire goal of email marketing is to get people to click through to your company website. Your email needs to include at least one link that sends subscribers to a dedicated landing page that continues the email message. Similar to marketing campaigns that utilize search engines, you want to create a dedicated landing page for your email campaign, making sure that you include the link in the email.
Using a ‘One-Size-Fits-All’ Approach
The most effective form of any marketing method is relevance. Your message needs to be relevant to your subscribers. The one-size-fits-all approach no longer works. Being relevant shows that you care about your subscribers. Only 11 percent of businesses segment their email lists, which makes creating relevant email marketing campaigns a competitive advantage for your business. Your segmentation can be basic or complex. By segmenting your list and customizing your message, you’ll have more engaged customers and higher click-through rates.
Ignoring Mobile
Fifty-four percent of all emails are now opened on a mobile device, and 40 percent of mobile users check their email more than four times a day. If your email campaign isn’t optimized for mobile devices many of your subscribers may not be able to read your message.
The Most Important KPIs for Measuring Your Email Marketing Success
If you’re using email marketing campaigns in your business to engage your customers and boost sales, how do you know if they are effective? The only way to know for sure if your email marketing campaign is working is by measuring your key performance indicators (KPIs), which are specific marketing metrics that you can monitor to measure the progress of your email marketing campaigns. Here are the most important metrics to keep in mind for your email marketing campaign.
Deliverability Rate
The deliverability rate refers to where your email messages end up after they’ve been delivered. It tells you whether your emails ended up in the subscriber’s inbox or if they ended up in their spam folder.
Open Rate
This is the percentage of subscribers who opened your email, viewed your email, and whether they opened it more than once. For example, if you send an email to 100 people and 25 of those people opened your email, then your open rate will be 25 percent.
Click-Through Rate
The click-through rate shows you the number of people who clicked on at least one of the links in your email. This is a good way for you to gauge the interest of your subscribers because it shows you how many are taking time to click and dig a bit more.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate metric allows you to take things a bit further by taking a look at the definite action that you want the clicks to result in. It measures the percentage of people who clicked on a link in your email and completed the desired action, like making a purchase or filling out a form.
Bounce Rate
This metric looks at the number of emails that didn’t reach your customers’ inbox. There are two different kinds of bounce rates that you should be tracking, the soft bounce rate and the hard bounce rate. The soft bounce rate is when the subscriber’s email box is full, or there is a problem with the server. A hard bounce is when there is an invalid email address and your email bounces back.
Unsubscribe Rate
This is the percentage of people who unsubscribe from your email list. If you have a particular email that results in high unsubscribe rates, then you’ll want to rethink a few things and adjust your next campaign accordingly.
List Growth Rate
This shows you how quickly your email list is growing. The metric takes into account the bounces, unsubscribes, and the number of contacts that are added to your list during a specific time.
Keeping an eye on these key metrics will help you develop a successful email marketing campaign.
