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Email marketing! yes, you read that correctly as email marketing is literally a “Blast from the Past” marketing solution that had proved effectiveness over past decades and will remain effective in the future.
You’re wondering why email marketing is a cost-effective marketing solution and that is because of many reasons including:
- Email marketing provides a direct communication channel with leads & customers
- Your business will reach the desired exposure with 3.7 billion active email users around the world
- Higher Engagement as 94% of email users open their emails daily with 64% of users check their emails 3 times at least daily
- Effective in nurturing leads with valuable content and products promotion & turning them into customers
- Effective in maintaining a profitable relationship with customers & transforming them to loyal customers with value-added from email campaigns
- Higher ROI than other marketing solutions as for every 1$ spent, an average of 44$ return on investment achieved
- The primary source of lead generation for 80% of marketers
When deciding to launch a marketing campaign, the first issue to focus on selecting suitable marketing channels with effective solutions to communicate with your business target audience and acceptable expected ROI to avoid wasting valuable time & resources.
We have explained how effective email marketing campaigns for many business goals including generating leads and transforming leads to customers & customers to loyal customers but that is not the end as we will discuss step by step how to launch effective email marketing campaigns to take advantage of one of the most effective digital marketing solutions.
Every day you delete or mark emails as spam for your email inbox and the same of all email active users due to many reasons including lame subject lines, invaluable content and having no interest in what these emails are promoting.
The case is the same for your business email marketing campaigns as you need to excel your campaigns from A-Z to avoid losing potential leads or current customers due to failing to deliver your business message in a compelling way to the targeted audience.
By the end of this guide you’ll be ready to start your business successful email marketing campaign achieving all predefined desired goals.
7 steps to run a successful email marketing campaign:
All different marketing campaigns including email marketing campaigns are expected to be a failed one without a well-crafted strategy that defines main important aspects including:
- The desired business goals to accomplish throughout the campaign
- The targeted audience and their buyer personas
- Type of suitable email marketing campaign for each audience segment (Newsletter – New products or product updates announcements – Discount & Promotional offers – Event invitations – Market surveys)
- The schedule and sequence for emails sent
- Suitable effective email marketing services & tools
- Suitable metrics to analyze your campaign performance
Once you defined all mentioned aspects, you’ll be ready to go further in your journey to achieve the desired goals.
You’re a guest in your potential leads and customers email account inbox but you’ll need the permission to be there at first and that’s why you need to avoid buying email lists and start building your email list carefully from scratch through the following solutions:
- Opt-in (sign up) forms
- A social media marketing campaign for generating email marketing leads
- Physical stores signup sheets
The most successful solution to generate email leads is opt-in forms on your business website that are easy to fill and get permission to address potential leads with customized emails.
11 effective placements to add your opt-in (signup) forms in your website:
- Footer
- Header
- Welcome Gate
- Splash Page
- Signup Page
- Timed Lightbox Popup
- Scroll Box
- Floating Bar
- Sidebar
- Exit-intent Popup
- Within Blog Posts
Encourage targeted audience to subscribe in your email list using a lead magnet that offers value for different segments and a lead magnet could be:
- PDF Guides
- eBooks
- Slide Presentations
- Free Trails
- Discount Coupons
- Audio & Video Tutorials
Or anything else when it’s free, valuable, interesting, relevant, solves a problem, easy to use and consume.
Optimize your opt-in (signup) forms to encourage more leads to subscribe by:
- Using enticing headlines
- Crafting an appealing design
- Describing the value-added from your business emails
- Adding a suitable call-to-action (CTA)
- Using easy to fill forms
Customizing the message in your email marketing campaign is an intelligent approach to use as sending the same content for all subscribers will decrease emails open rate, click-through-rate (CTR) & conversions and increase unsubscribe rate from potential leads who received disturbing emails that add no value.
Each segment should receive customized & personalized content that suits their interests and positions in your sales funnel.
Potential segments of your email list subscribers could be:
- New subscribers
- Interests-based
- Demographics-based
- Location-based
- Activity-based
- Based on the offered lead magnet
- Shopping cart abandoners
- Chosen mailing schedules (Daily – Weekly – Monthly)
Once you defined segments of your email list, you’ll be able to craft customized messages that increase open rate and desired conversions.
The healthy open rate is between 20% to 40% of emails sent but many campaigns fail to even reach that percentage and all efforts and resources devoted in your email marketing campaign will be wasted with no actual return.
To improve your emails open rate, you should consider executing the following tips:
- Make sure all leads provide permission through opt-in (signup) forms
- Send emails from verified domains
- Avoid sending from an IP address with spam history
- Avoid excessive promotional language & tone in subject lines
- Optimize subject lines through numbers, stats, curiosity lines & friendly conversational tone
- Focus mainly on active engaging subscribers
- Perform A/B tests to define perfect timing for sending emails to each audience segment
- Send emails using a real person name not the brand name
- Optimize the preview text (first 35 – 140 characters) by providing an overview of the email content
- Resend unopened emails with different subject lines awhile (3-5) days after the first time
Once you reached an acceptable open rate, the next step is to engage subscribers with optimized valuable content and professional visual outlay.
The critical phase is when your emails are opened as your emails content and design will define the percentage of engagement with your campaign and if potential leads will go further in your sales funnel and complete desired conversions or delete your future emails and unsubscribe from your email list.
Email marketing content types are:
- Company information
- Product updates
- New products announcements
- How-to tutorials
- Discount & Promotional offers
- Informative content (Blog posts – Infographics – PDF Guides)
- Customers feedback & testimonials
- Answers of leads & customers’ FAQ
To optimize your email marketing campaigns content, perform the following tips:
- Customize and personalize content for your buyer personas
- Focus on educational relative content over promotional content (80% – 20%)
- Optimize content, visuals, and design for mobiles (66% of email browsing activity) using short subject lines, big fonts, small-sized images, large CTA buttons in the middle, use one column template and add only vertical links
- Mix content format using text, images, and videos
- Perform A/B tests on your email copy
- Avoid all caps shouting tone
- Keep your emails brief or allocate long text in an appealing design
- Use short paragraphs, white space, subheadings, and bullet points to make content more readable
- Address the reader needs more than talking about the brand
- Use fonts and color pallets used in other marketing channels for the brand
- Use Visual CTAs & Buttons
- Choose CTAs colors based on emotions targeted
- Keep the layout simple, professional & easy to navigate
- Pitch your products & solutions gradually by discussing a common problem for the targeted audience then discuss how they could deal with it while emphasizing your solutions’ competitive advantages
- Educate potential customers about how to fully utilize your products
- Direct subscribers to optimized relevant landing pages
- Provide unsubscribe option in your emails to avoid marking content as spam
Every segment and phase in your sales funnel will require to create customized personalized content to increase CTR and desired conversions and decrease unsubscribe rate.
Once you have built your email list, divided subscribers into segments and created content suitable for each phase in relationship with your prospects (Leads –> Active subscribers –> Customers –> Loyal customers –> Brand advocates), you should now use Autoresponder email series to engage subscribers with email customized to follow specific triggered actions including:
- Joining your email list
- Buying behavior on your website
- Content consumption like downloading a PDF guide
Many email marketing services providers offer “Autoresponder” option to its clients including:
Through sequenced email series based on each subscriber engagement and behavior, you’ll be able to guide subscribers further in your sales funnel plus promoting cross-sells & up-sells.
Suitable chosen email marketing performance metrics will define the quality and effectiveness of your email campaigns regarding:
- Proper segmentation and targeting
- Subject lines effectiveness
- Content quality
- CTAs effectiveness
- Proper email series sequence
Focus on the following email marketing performance metrics to define your campaigns’ weaknesses and improve performance:
- Open Rate: how many times your emails were opened out of the total sent emails
- CTR: how many times an added link in your emails have been clicked
- Unsubscribe rate: how many subscribers have unsubscribed from your email list
- Number of bounces: how many email addresses didn’t receive emails
- Spam complaints%: the percentage of marking your emails as spam form recipients
- Shares: how many times your emails were forward to another person or shared on social media
Add Google Analytics tracking code to your email marketing campaigns to track and analyze the subscribers’ traffic on your website and respond to their behavior with suitable emails.
Email marketing is a long-term journey that requires commitment, patience to perform many tests & drive desired results, skills in creating suitable content to communicate better with your potential leads & current customers and to be aligned with other marketing campaigns on different platforms.
Start collaborating with your in-house internal marketing team or seek help from professional marketing agency specialized in providing email marketing solutions to achieve an average of 4400% return on investment (ROI) when you launch successful email marketing campaigns.
Contact us today to start your business email marketing campaign
[kc_custom_heading text="How to launch a successful email marketing campaign?" font_container="tag:h2|font_size:30px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" use_theme_fonts="yes"][kc_empty_space height="20px"][kc_single_image image="25321" img_size="large"][kc_custom_heading text="#1. Establish your email marketing strategy " font_container="tag:h3|font_size:20px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" google_fonts="font_family:Allerta%3Aregular|font_style:400%20regular%3A400%3Anormal"][kc_empty_space height="20px"][kc_custom_heading text="#2. Build your email list carefully " font_container="tag:h3|font_size:20px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" google_fonts="font_family:Allerta%3Aregular|font_style:400%20regular%3A400%3Anormal"][kc_empty_space height="20px"][kc_video link="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZLVjaeBAVU"][kc_custom_heading text="#3. Divide your email list into different segments " font_container="tag:h3|font_size:20px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" google_fonts="font_family:Allerta%3Aregular|font_style:400%20regular%3A400%3Anormal"][kc_empty_space height="20px"][kc_custom_heading text="#4. Improve your email campaigns open rate" font_container="tag:h3|font_size:20px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" google_fonts="font_family:Allerta%3Aregular|font_style:400%20regular%3A400%3Anormal"][kc_empty_space height="20px"][kc_custom_heading text="#5. Add value with optimized email content " font_container="tag:h3|font_size:20px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" google_fonts="font_family:Allerta%3Aregular|font_style:400%20regular%3A400%3Anormal"][kc_empty_space height="20px"][kc_single_image image="25326" img_size="large" alignment="right"][kc_custom_heading text="#6. Use Autoresponder sequenced email series " font_container="tag:h3|font_size:20px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" google_fonts="font_family:Allerta%3Aregular|font_style:400%20regular%3A400%3Anormal"][kc_empty_space height="20px"][kc_video link="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQGUF6k3QKo"][kc_custom_heading text="#7. Evaluate performance using suitable metrics " font_container="tag:h3|font_size:20px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" google_fonts="font_family:Allerta%3Aregular|font_style:400%20regular%3A400%3Anormal"][kc_empty_space height="20px"][kc_custom_heading text="Summary " font_container="tag:h2|font_size:30px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" use_theme_fonts="yes"][kc_empty_space height="20px"]
