How to Craft an Effective Email Marketing Campaign

As an online marketer, one of the biggest hurdles to go through is finding a cost-efficient, but effective, way to market your brand.

According to a survey that was done by the Content Marketing Institute, over 93 percent of B2B marketers said they used emails to help them distribute their content. Additionally, 40 percent of these marketers considered email newsletters as an integral part of their success with content marketing strategies.

From these numbers, it is evident that email marketing is a goldmine for any digital marketer. However, for you to get the most out of email marketing, you need to know how to create an effective email marketing campaign. To help you, here are the steps on how to craft an effective email marketing campaign.

1. Know Your Goals

Just like any other form of marketing, email marketing requires you to set realistic goals. You have to think about what you want to achieve with your email marketing campaign.

Some of the most common goals include welcoming the newest subscribers, building relationships, boosting engagement, and even re-engaging your inactive subscribers. You can also set your goals based on your conversion goals.

2. Know Your Audience

No matter what product or service you’re selling, you need to have a clear idea of who your audience is. Knowing this makes it easy for you to communicate with them effectively.

If you are just getting started with marketing, you can gather data on your audience easily using Google Analytics and even your social media accounts. Both are great sources of important data on your audience’s location, demographics, and interests. This should be enough information to help you craft a successful email marketing campaign.

3. Build a Targeted Email List

The first and most important step in creating a successful email marketing campaign is building an email list. This should be an organic list of people who will likely be interested in your products or services.

The easiest way to do this is by converting your current website traffic into subscribers. You simply include an email signup form on your blog or website.

While you can also build a list using borrowed, purchased, or scraped lists, the chances of your emails getting ignored or ending up in the spam folder will be high since it will be a fake list. This is why it is important to build your own list, as the subscribers that you get from your website traffic will be much more likely to open and view your emails.

4. Segment Your Email Lists

After you have gathered a decent number of subscribers, you should consider segmenting your contacts into separate lists. The segments should be based on relevant aspects like the lifecycle stages of your visitors, their demographics, interests, buying frequency, or even their behavior and engagement. You will need to make segments that make sense for you, your business and your goals.

Unlike just sending out generic emails, segmenting your list enables you to tailor your outgoing emails in a way that can much better match the needs of the various segments. Additionally, you will be able to add a touch of personalization to your emails.

5. Write a Good Subject Line

Your subject line is one of the most crucial parts of your email marketing campaign. This is because it is the part that will determine whether someone will click and open your email or not.

Just like blog post headlines, email subject lines should also be able to catch the attention of readers and make them want to read further. A good email subject line should not have a lot of words. The characters should range between 41 and 50 characters and tell the reader clearly what they should expect to see upon opening your email.

6. Write the Copy

After you have come up with a short, clear, and catchy subject line, you should proceed to write the actual copy for your email. Just like when writing your blog posts, the beginning of your email marketing copy should make your reader want to read on.

The rule of thumb is to keep your copy short and also avoid introducing your offer too early at the beginning. You should first focus on getting your reader to feel comfortable before you start pitching products to them.

The last part of your copy should be the call to action (CTA). This should reflect whatever it is you want your reader to do after he or she has read your email.

7. Don’t Neglect Design

The design of your email newsletter is an integral part of your email marketing campaign. The first place to start is by using a responsive email template. As many people read their emails on their phones and tablets nowadays, your email should be able to resize automatically according to the device that your reader is using.

You should also ensure your email has more text than images. Although images will seem to make your emails more attractive, a large number of people tend to disable images. When you use images, remember to use alt tags which describe the images so people who have disabled them can read what they were supposed to see.

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8. Track the results

After you have done all the following steps, you should run a test to see how effective your email marketing campaign is, from the design and layout to your subject line and call to action. It is a good idea to test your emails on different email list segments and send times.

After you have sent out emails, remember to track the results using email analytics tools to see how your readers received your message. To do this, check your user’s clicks, opens, and unsubscribes.

When you analyze these results, you will be able to understand your readers better and be able to craft more effective campaigns.

9. Schedule Your Emails