May 7, 2024
Looking to officially kick off your email marketing initiatives? Creating your email campaign is no easy feat, especially if you want results that truly matter.
In this guide, learn email marketing basics, whether you're a beginner or just trying to get your business started on email campaigns.
Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy in which brands and businesses send professionally crafted emails to targeted recipients to promote products, services, or content. It should deliver valuable information to a target audience to drive action.
An email marketing campaign can have different goals. The most common intentions set by businesses are to engage with potential or existing customers, nurture leads, increase brand awareness, drive traffic to a website, and ultimately boost sales or conversions.
In this email marketing tutorial, you'll learn to create a successful email campaign. Marketing campaigns must be carefully planned, from defining your objectives to production and analysing campaign results.
Having a clear objective for your marketing emails makes it easier to determine the direction of your messaging. Establishing clear objectives also ensures that your email campaigns are aligned with your overall marketing goals, making it easier to define success metrics, whether it’s increasing sales, driving traffic, or nurturing leads.
Define your goals. For instance, do you want to increase website traffic, improve engagement, or boost conversions? The best way to determine this is to set SMART goals.
For a better idea, here are some examples of well-defined goals:
A targeted, quality email list helps you reach the right audience, and segmentation increases relevance, which improves engagement.
Well-placed sign-up forms can help you grow your email contact list. Use real estate on your website, blog, or social media, offering incentives like discounts, free resources, or exclusive content to encourage users to subscribe.
Segmenting involves organising contacts based on specific criteria. Some common segmentation categories you might consider are:
A good email delivery service allows you to automate, track, and optimise your campaigns. Choose a platform that offers capabilities that complement your existing workflow. Some features you may need are email and marketing automation, A/B testing, segmentation, personalisation, and analytics. Some email marketing tools offer features that track a customer's past purchases which you can use for segmentation efforts.
Your email marketing platform should also seamlessly integrate with other tools that your team already uses, such as CRM, e-commerce, and social media platforms.
The key to crafting high-quality and engaging emails is offering truly relevant content that encourages users or your audience to take action. This helps drive better open rates, click-through rates, and conversions — all of which are success metrics you may look for.
When developing the content for your email marketing campaign, thoughtful consideration must go into the entire structure. Here's a breakdown of how to create an email.
Subject lines serve as the primary hook to get your audience to open an email. Keep it short to a maximum of 50 characters, but the fewer characters, the better.
Messages should be personalised with their names, while the tone should ideally be more conversational to make them easier to read. The best content offers benefits that explain what a customer may gain from using your product or service.
Images, graphics, and videos are valuable content that supports your message. They're also a great way to showcase your product, service, or important features.
The call-to-action is ideally limited to a maximum of four short words. Similar to the subject line, the fewer, the better. Some great examples are "Shop Now," "Learn More," and "Add to Cart."
Personalisation improves engagement, helping audiences feel like you genuinely care about them. There are ways to automate personalisation to save time while ensuring timely and targeted email delivery.
How to do it:
Customise content using the recipient’s name, tailor content to their preferences, or recommend products based on previous interactions.
Automate email flows with your email marketing platform. Some essential messages you may want to send are:
Approximately 1.7 billion people access emails through their mobile devices, making it essential to optimise emails for mobile platforms. Not only can this enhance readability, but it can also increase engagement for its accessibility
How to do it:
Testing ensures that your email is visually appealing, functional, and effective. Think of it as the digital marketing version of quality checks for emails before it reaches your audience. Some effective ways you can implement this include:
Timing can significantly impact your success metrics. A good email delivery service should allow you to optimise when sending out your content based on time zones or historical open data.
You can also use the opportunity to experiment with different send times and analyse performance to find the best time for your audience.
Tracking performance helps you understand what’s working and where improvements are needed to boost your metrics in the next campaign. Review your email marketing performance regularly to identify trends and areas for improvement. You can also use insights from A/B testing to optimise future campaigns.
Key metrics to monitor:
Metrics may vary depending on your email campaign's goals; however, knowing what metrics to examine can make all the difference.
Email marketing is an iterative process, and constant refinement ensures ongoing improvement. In addition to using data from previous email campaigns, you can ideate new strategies, such as new formats and subject lines, for further testing.
Learn from subscriber feedback and behaviour to shape future content. This can help re-engage inactive subscribers.
There are many types of email campaigns. Determining what you'd like to use for your email marketing depends on its relevance to your goals. These are some of the most common email campaigns you can create with and without marketing automation tools.
The 5 C's of email writing refer to five essential principles that help ensure clear, professional, and effective communication through email. These principles are widely used in business communication to enhance clarity and encourage the recipient to take appropriate action.
Clearly state the purpose of the email at the beginning and reiterate it, if necessary, at the end. The email should be easy to read and understand. Clarity helps prevent misunderstandings and ensures that the main message is conveyed effectively.
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Emails should be brief and to the point, containing only the necessary information. Recipients are more likely to read and respond to emails that are concise.
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Politeness and professionalism are key in email communication. Being courteous helps build positive relationships and ensures that your message is well-received.
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Accuracy is crucial in email writing to maintain professionalism and ensure that your message is taken seriously. This applies to both the content of the email and its structure.
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Ensure that the email provides all the necessary information for the recipient to take the next steps or understand the context. An incomplete email may lead to confusion or the need for follow-up clarification.
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Email campaigns are a versatile and powerful tool for engaging customers and driving business growth. By leveraging different types of email campaigns, businesses can build stronger relationships with their audience, enhance brand visibility, and increase conversions.
Tailoring each campaign type to meet specific goals ensures a well-rounded email marketing strategy catering to existing and potential customers. Ultimately, a thoughtful approach to email campaigns helps brands maintain meaningful communication and achieve long-term success.
