Email marketing should be considered as one of the most powerful tools that a business can use to contact their audience, engage them, and convert them. If you have the right approach an email campaign can increase your marketing strategy yield better results, generate higher ROI and deep customer engagement. If you are new to email campaigns or if you’d like to improve today’s – this guide will take you step by step through the following 5 essentials for email campaigns.
Step 1: SOV: Define Your Objective, Define Your Audience
Before you send any email out, it’s important to have a defined purpose for your campaign and a clear audience you want to reach. If you want your emails to have any effect, then your understanding of why you are sending the mail is essential — are you hoping to drum up sales, create some brand awareness, push out a crazy special offer, or nurture relationships with previous customers? Each of these objectives will help you determine the content, structure, and call to action that your emails feature.
It’s also important to be clear on who your audience is, along with the objective. Emails will attract the most attention if you segment your email list based on demographics, previous interactions with your brand, purchase behavior, and engagement history. More often than not, a generic email is going to result in a generic response, so the best scenario is a personalized email that resonates with the right audience.
Step 2: Doing such requires crafting compelling subject lines and content.
Recipients see the subject line, the first thing, and whether your email will be opened or ignored. So it has to be attention grabbing, concise and relevant. It could be any but a compelling subject line with urgency, curiosity or even value in it, will set you into a trap of them wanting to click.
Here are some tips for crafting effective subject lines:
Make it short (about 6–10 words).
For example, use personalization (e.g. ‘Hey [Name] We’ve got something special for you!’).
Make it something rare e.g. (‘Limited time offer – don’t miss out!’).
Don’t go overboard with all caps or too many exclamation points, or it might seem like you’re trying to spam people.
On the other hand, once the subject line is done, it’s time to write something that has value, relevance and ease to communicate. Try to stay clear and concise, have a good CTA in your message; which tells the reader what the next action is. The content are bulleted, short paragraphs and bolded for readability.
Step 3: Mobile and User Experience Design
With a big percentage of your emails being opened on mobile, it’s crucial that you optimize your emails for mobile viewing. High bounce rates and poor engagement? A quick way to kill a mobile experience.
To optimize your email design for mobile:
Keep in mind the use of a responsive design template that will adjust to the screen size, which means there will no need for different versions for different devices.
Keep text and image simple and readable and don’t load images or use any design that causes too much loading time.
Make sure your buttons and CTA are large enough to click on mobile devices easily.
Make sure your email looks good on all devices to test the email’s design.
Also included in user experience is providing your email so that it is accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. If you improve your campaign’s inclusivity, this can be achieved by using accessible fonts, providing alt text for images and making your email work with screen readers.
Step 4: Speed Up and Personalize Your Campaigns
Running a successful email campaign can be automated. This means you are seeping into your audience’s inboxes by email automatically via email sequences based on certain actions taken (signing up for a newsletter, leaving a shopping cart, etc.).
Automation is, however, personalization’s opposite. A personalized email is more practical and more prone to higher open and click through rates. Tailor your emails to the audience and use their name, preferences, past purchases, and any other data you have in accordance with them.
Here are some ways to personalize your emails:
This is a dynamic content that changes depending on customer behavior.
Product recommendations based on previous interactions for a particular user.
Offers based on recipient’s location or time zone that are time sensitive.
Step 5: Optimize Your Own Campaigns
But that doesn’t mean the final step in mastering email campaigns is done until you find a way to see if it’s all working, and make data driven improvements to your campaigns. Important data from email marketing platforms includes open rates, click through rates, bounce rates and conversion rates. Looking at these shows us what is working and what we can improve.
Here are some key metrics to monitor:
Open Rate: Tells you how many recipients opened your email. It enables to you evaluate the efficacy of your own subject line and sender name.
Click-through Rate (CTR): Tells you how many recipients clicked links or CTA’s inside your email. This means a higher CTR, and that your content is relevant, engaging.
Bounce Rate: Gives the number of undeliverable emails. A high bounce rate, however, is sometimes used to signify poor quality of your email list.
Conversion Rate: It is a measure of how many of the recipients actually did their desired action (purchase, sign up, etc.).
These metrics give you a basis to optimize future campaigns by testing out different subject lines, altering send times or trimming your email content. One of the best ways to test out the elements of your email is through A/B testing.
Conclusion
To master the art of email campaigns, you need keywords, strategy, creative, and data driven decisions. With these 5 simple steps—Define your target, create compelling content, build for mobile, automate & personalize, measure— you can craft email campaigns that not only get read, but ensure your efforts result in real actions!
If handled the right way, email marketing can serve as a monumental aspect of your marketing strategy, strengthening your relationships as well as having your business thrive.
