How to create a successful e-mail marketing campaign?

With some 269 billion emails sent every day, the competition for the already highly distracted attention of your audience is enormous, but it’s still gainful: email marketing is still up to 40 times more effective than social media efforts because it compels customers to make a purchase decision faster. That’s why it’s really worth taking some time to create a successful e-mail marketing campaign. Read our guidelines and discover how to do it properly.

How to create a successful e-mail marketing campaign – table of contents:

1. What is an email marketing campaign?
2. How to conduct a successful e-mail marketing campaign?
3. How do you segment your audience base and personalize your message?
4. How to analyze the effectiveness of email marketing efforts?

If today, almost every Internet user has at least one active e-mail address, the preparation of an effective e-mail marketing campaign should not pose major problems, right? Unfortunately, this only proves the potential of this channel, and where the potential is huge, there is no shortage of people willing to use it.

What is an email marketing campaign?

An e-mail marketing campaign is nothing more than a message sent to a specific group of recipients whom we want to encourage to undertake a given activity. It may be signing up for a newsletter, visiting a sales page, downloading an e-book or making a purchase.

When makes a successful e-mail marketing campaign?

Of course, when the recipients behave exactly as we want them to, i.e., sign up for our newsletter, visit our sales page, download an e-book or buy something. E-mail marketing is an ideal tool to build and maintain relationships with customers, which translates into generating sales. For this to happen, however, you need to take care not only by preparing catchy advertising.

The fight for customer attention begins much, much earlier, and preparatory activities include gathering a database of contacts and its segmentation. Only then you can move on to preparing the campaign, which should be tailored as much as possible to the needs of specific recipients. But first you need to know them.

How to conduct a successful e-mail marketing campaign?

Start with the database

Effective email marketing campaigns start with your contact database, which should consist of the email addresses of those customers who are interested in what you have to offer. Therefore, it’s best to make sure you create your own, because while it’s still common to outsource campaigns, their effectiveness is usually much lower.

Your own address database gives you a lot more opportunities that are likely to translate into sales. This is because it consists of the addresses of people who are interested in what you have to say, and therefore may buy what you are selling.

How to build your own database?

But how do you build your own base? The ideal way is to encourage users to sign up for your newsletter. They need to know that they have this opportunity but also see a clear reason for it. To do so, you can offer them a discount on their first or second purchase or free delivery. This process, although tedious and demanding, will certainly pay off, because – by analyzing the behavior of our own users – we can personalize the content we send to increase its effectiveness.

Pay attention to personalization

A recent survey of 200 marketing leaders conducted by Forbes Insights and Arm Treasure Data found that where personalization is used in a strong way, companies are achieving positive results. Forty percent of executives surveyed said their customer personalization efforts had a direct impact on maximizing e-commerce sales, its size and profits (Source: Forbes).

Provide useful content

However, users who have chosen to leave you their email can withdraw their consent to receive your content at any time, which is guaranteed by law. Make sure then, that they don’t want to do so by providing useful content. In e-commerce thought, it is not so difficult, as you can create and send personalized content based on, for example, data showing the most visited product categories, wish lists, or create special offers (such as back to school or the beginning of the vacations).

The pretext is not so important, the point is to offer the users something that may interest him, because even if they do not make a purchase at the moment, they will not consider the email as spam.

How do you segment your audience base and personalize your message?

In any sufficiently broad customer base, several distinctive subgroups can be identified, which are used to be called segments.

Using this division, we can tailor the message to each of these groups to effectively encourage users to become active. And making users active means you’ve created a successful e-mail marketing campaign.

Further segments can be created individually on the basis of data provided directly or indirectly by our users. In order to collect as much data as possible, you can ask for it, e.g., in the form of a survey, but it is also necessary to constantly monitor behavior, e.g., using Google Analytics. You can segment your customers by demographics, behavior, location, etc. It all depends on what products and services you sell.

An appropriately divided base, will allow the precise selection of messages to its needs. The creation of advertising itself, should also give the customer a sense of exceptional treatment. Content that reaches users should not overwhelm with the amount of text or figures, but should be visual, legible and understandable.

Remember about CTAs! The so-called calls to action, should stand out in color and be placed within the user’s sight. Special attention should be paid to news topics. They should be open-ended, which gives rise to the temptation to create them in a tabloid fashion. Click-bait style, however, should absolutely be avoided. “Deceptive” headlines, even if they ensure high open rate (the total number of users who opened the message), will not translate into the increase of sales, which is ultimately what it is all about.

How to analyze the effectiveness of email marketing efforts?

Metrics like click-through-rate (CTR) or open rate (OR) shouldn’t be an end in themselves, because they can’t tell you the truth about how your emails are impacting your business. To properly evaluate the effectiveness of our email marketing efforts, you need to focus on sales data, and – to do that – you need to integrate your outbound platform with Google Analytics and, if you use it, your CRM. Linking sales data with data flowing from email marketing platforms, also allows for a better combination of the efforts of marketers with the actual business results of the organization. From there it’s only a step to achieving a successful e-mail marketing campaign.

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