An email campaign is a coordinated set of individual email messages that are deployed across a specific period of time with one specific purpose, such as download a white paper, sign up for a webinar, or make a purchase with a provided coupon. Each email requires a well-written subject line, focused content, and a specific call to action to achieve the campaign’s goal.
An email campaign is a sequence of marketing efforts that contacts multiple recipients at once. Email campaigns are designed to reach out to subscribers at the best time and provide valuable content and relevant offers. Using email campaigns allows you to build deep and trusting relationships with your customers.
Email Campaign Types
- Welcome emails
- Announcement emails
- Testimonial request emails
- Holiday emails
- Invitation emails
- Seasonal emails
- Reactivation emails
- Abandoned shopping cart emails
- Cross-selling emails
- Upselling emails
- Newsletters
- Anniversary emails
- Welcome emails:
A welcome email is sent when a user subscribes to your mailing list. Ask clients to set their preferences regarding email frequency and the content they are going to receive.
- Announcement emails:
These are sent to announce an upcoming holiday, event, release of a new product or feature, etc. The aim is to make subscribers interested, encourage them to buy or to visit.
- Testimonial request emails:
This email campaign is sent to ask clients to leave feedback by commenting, reviewing, or completing a survey to improve the service.
- Holiday emails:
This type of email campaign engages people with holiday discounts before Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, New Year, and other holidays. It builds trust and strengthens positive emotions associated with your brand.
- Invitation emails:
This email campaign invites subscribers to visit an online webinar, a party, a conference, etc.
- Seasonal emails:
Intended for sending relevant seasonal offers like umbrellas in fall, or sunglasses in summer, for instance.
- Reactivation emails:
Emails sent to inactive clients who lost interest or have forgotten about your company. Don’t just say goodbye to them, try to reactivate and remind them how much value you can share.
- Abandoned shopping cart emails.
Sometimes subscribers leave items in the shopping cart without buying them for some reason. An abandoned cart email suggests that subscribers return to their carts and inspires them to complete the purchase.
- Cross-selling emails:
This type of email campaign promotes related products. If your client bought a smartphone, a phone case would be great to cross-sell.
- Upselling emails.
It describes and offers more advanced, upgrades, and expensive products than the customer considered or bought before.
- Newsletters:
The most widespread email campaign. Newsletters provide customers with valuable and non-promotional information. If performed well, newsletters help brands build trusting and loyal relationships with people.
- Anniversary emails:
With this type of email, you can congratulate subscribers on the company’s anniversary and reward your loyal clients. It increases sales, brand awareness, and customer loyalty.
Creating a Successful Email Campaign
- Set your goals
- Grow your opt-in mailing list
- Segment your mailing list
- Create emails with a consistent layout
- Write a good copy
- Personalize an email campaign
- Use A/B testing
- Set your goals. What is the aim of your email campaign? Having a goal helps you select the type of email, design, and create valuable content for your recipients. Try to set realistic goals that are achievable and monitor your efficiency.
- Grow your opt-in mailing list. Find out the best media for gathering subscribers. Create a subscription form for your website or blog and collect the data you consider the most important for your mailing list: email address, phone number, name, gender, and country— whatever you may need to create relevant and targeted email campaigns. Don’t forget that your mailing list should be double opt-in, which means that you will gather an audience of only people who are genuinely interested in your services.
- Segment your mailing list. Segmentation highly increases relevancy and targeting. It’s convenient to segment mailing lists with, and opportunities for segmentation are virtually unlimited. Segment your mailing list according to the country, gender, place in the sales funnel, etc.
- Create emails with a consistent layout. If the mailing list is up and ready, create an email campaign with the help of a drag and drop editor, which allows creating great templates without coding.
- Write a good copy. The style of the text should correspond to your brand’s general identity. Create a funny and intriguing subject line and preheader text. Put the most tasteful information there to encourage the recipients to open your email. The copy inside the email should be meaningful with a purpose in every word and lead a reader to the CTA smoothly.
- Personalize an email campaign. Another reliable tool for success with an email campaign is personalization. The data that you’ve gathered enables you to personalize the subject line and provide subscribers with slightly different emails at once according to their email preferences and behavior.
- Use A/B testing. A/B testing gives you a chance to clarify whether your email will impress your audience or not, without sending it to the entire list. The size of your mailing list determines the number of recipients required for testing. For instance, you can test different subject lines by sending two different emails to two equal groups of people. After that, you will know which variant is better. The same goes for email visual and text content, CTAs, sender’s name, etc.
Steps of Email campaign creation:
Choose an email marketing service provider
If you’re serious about email marketing, you need to work with an email marketing service provider. Working with a provider is the only way your business can leverage email marketing automation to effectively deliver messages to large groups of contacts or subscribers.
You’ll also benefit from professional email templates, tools to help you grow and manage your email list, and tracking features that show you who is opening and engaging with your campaigns and messages.
Gather contacts for your email marketing list
Most businesses will have some existing contacts to start an email list. Think of the customers and people you already have a relationship with. Maybe it’s the business contacts you email with on a regular basis; maybe you just start with a few supportive friends and family members.
Even if you’re building an email list completely from scratch, don’t get discouraged. Start by putting a paper sign-up sheet near your register, adding an online sign-up form to your website, and encouraging your social media followers and loyal customers to sign up.
Add your contacts into your email marketing account
Once you have an email marketing account and an initial list to send to, add your contacts into your account.
You can start by uploading a contact list from an existing spreadsheet or importing contacts right from a Gmail or Outlook account. If possible, organize your contacts into separate lists based on what you know about them. For example, if you own a gym, create separate email lists for people who have taken swimming lessons versus those who have attended yoga classes.
That way you can send out targeted email based on their specific interests.
Set up your welcome email
Your welcome email is the first message your new email subscribers receive from you.
Welcome emails are especially important because they serve as your first impression and reach people at a time when they’re highly engaged with your business. You can expect a higher than average open rate for your welcome email, so make sure you’re delivering value right away.
Start with a warm greeting, provide an overview of what they can expect to receive from you in the future, and offer them something useful right away.
Once set up, your welcome email will send to all new contacts automatically.
Create a reusable email template
This is the fun part! Even if you’re not a designer, you can send beautifully-designed professional emails that look good on any device.
Constant Contact has hundreds of email templates for you to choose from — including timely templates to stand out in the inbox.
When choosing a template, look for a layout that is clean, eye-catching, and will get your message across fast. People scroll through the inbox quickly — often while on the go — so choose a mobile-responsive email template that looks good on any device.
Next, customize your template with your brand by putting your business’s logo right at the top of your email and linking the image back to your website’s homepage. Add in your business’s signature colours and create an email footer with your business name, contact information, and links to your active social media channels.
Once you have these essential design elements all set up, make a copy of your email and save a version as your master template. With this reusable template, you don’t have to start from scratch and add in your branding every time.
Practice writing persuasive messages
This tends to be one of the scariest steps for business owners. I get it — writer’s block happens to the best of us.
What usually snaps me out of it is pretending I’m having a face-to-face conversation with someone and writing down exactly what I’d like to say to them.
It also helps to follow a repeatable process and break your message down into three important sections:
- What are you offering? — Headline
- How will it help the reader? — Message body
- What should they do next? — Call to action
This simple three-step formula helps you stay focused so you can write effective messages fast.
Spend time on subject lines
Your email subject line is one of the most important lines of text in your whole email.
Why? Your subscribers see your subject line even before they open your message. Make a good impression and people won’t be able to resist opening. Write something bland and they might skip over your message without a second thought.
Your subject line should be short and snappy — around 40 characters.
You can draw attention by asking a compelling question, including a deadline for urgency, or just teasing your message.
Preview and test before you send
Especially when you’re first getting started with email marketing, it’s easy to slip up every once in a while.
Maybe you forget to add in an important link or make an embarrassing spelling mistake right in the subject line. Unfortunately, there’s no Back button with email, so always remember to send yourself or a staff member a Test Email before sending out to your entire list.
Send your email (at the best time)
When you’re ready to send out an email, timing is an important factor to consider.
Every audience is different and the best time to send will differ based on who’s on your email list.
Based on customer data, we’ve compiled some information on which day and time might work best for your industry.
You can also create a consistent sending schedule and stick to it. For example, if you send out a newsletter on the first of every month, your audience will come to expect it in their inboxes.
If you do decide to follow a set schedule, tell people at the point of sign-up by saying something like:
Track your results
Don’t be deceived — email marketing doesn’t end with a send. You will want to track your open rate, click-through rate, and unsubscribe rates, etc. and work to improve over time.
If you want to see real results from your email marketing, you need a strong understanding of how each email performs so you can make improvements and learn more about your customers and subscribers.
Spending a few minutes in your email reports will tell you valuable information like who opened your email, who clicked on specific links, and what information was the most interesting to your readers.
While it’s important to know how engaging your campaign messages are, make sure you’re tracking actions that happen beyond your emails. How many clicks to your donation page are translating into real donations? What is the total amount of funds raised from a single email?
These are the types of questions that will show you the real impact of your marketing efforts.
About Adstuck:
Adstuck is a digital marketing practice agency working from all over the world with four locations India, Singapore, Estonia and US. Its mission is to provide instant access to a talented workforce to enterprise. They have 491 clients and worked over 700 projects, with 30 fortunes 500 firms.
Adstuck provide services in:
- Improving marketing results
- Creating social media marketing strategy
- Proper assessments of current trends
- Market research
- Campaign creation
- Growing market share
- Launching new product or enter new market.
It is a strong and leading digital media marketing service provider which can help you with cost cutting, plan execution, perfect reporting, strategy making, data collecting, and response collection from consumers. It handles all the aspects of your business. They don’t focus only on new on emerging brands who wants entail success and distribution in the market but also on brands that have successfully established the customer retail space, and need some assistance in managing their business.
