Ten Tips to Run an Effective Email Marketing Campaign

Recently, Facebook reached an impressive milestone: two billion active users. It’s a huge number, which has forced marketers to acknowledge that Facebook is too big to ignore. It’s a community bigger than the population of any single country in the world. However, there is a community that is bigger and older than Facebook. It’s quiet and prepared to hear about your products or services. It’s the community formed by email users. They are around 2.76 billion people who might buy from you if your offer is attractive.

Email marketing is highly competitive. I’m not saying that attracting leads from Facebook or managing other social networks is simple, but an email campaign is more complicated. Even though some marketers are in a hurry to say that email is dead and social media has replaced it, the reality is that email is still profitable. Email still has the biggest ROI.

Clearly, there are many reasons to focus on email marketing. However, an email campaign requires serious work, which starts in the prospecting phase, and the crafted email should look perfect. To help you, here are ten tips to bear in mind when running an email campaign.

1. Clear and Realistic Objectives

Before choosing your email marketing service provider or deciding between premium and free responsive email templates, you need to have clear goals. An email campaign could be a failure if you don’t set up objectives. The objectives must be quantifiable and realistic. For instance, it’s hard to measure a goal such as creating ten brand advocates. Instead, a goal of convincing 2.5% of the email recipients to download the free book within your email is measurable.

Unrealistic goals may hurt the evaluation of an email campaign. Every time you run an email campaign, check the statistics from your industry and of previous campaigns.

2. Responsible Subject Line

An email rarely gets a second chance, so it must create a good first impression. The sad part is that the subject line is the first impression. Users decide to open an email based on the subject line. That means that it should resonate with users. However, don’t cheat email recipients with a deceptive subject line.

Honesty is greatly appreciated in a world full of spam.

3. Good Design

There are so many free email campaign templates that look great so you have no excuse to use poor design.

A user opening your email means that they are interested in your message so it’s a pity to disappoint users with poor design. An email’s design is subconsciously associated with your brand. In other words, quality design converts better!

4. Mobile Optimisation

No matter how much thought you put into creating a good email design, everything is in vain if it is skewed on smartphone screens. Many people check emails on their smartphones first thing in the morning, and 54% of email opens occur on mobile devices. These stats must convince you that any email you send should be optimised for any type of screen. It’s challenging to craft the perfectly optimised email, and it requires much work. Still, there are many free email newsletter templates to select from. Check out these resources for additional information.

5. Well-Crafted Copy

Is your inbox crowded with tons of messages? Is it true that sometimes you delete a bunch of emails without even opening them? Don’t feel bad; you aren’t an exception. All of us do it!

Your copy should be short, concise, and clear. People don’t have the time or patience to check your writing skills. Put yourself in the shoes of your email readers before writing a single word!

In the email-marketing universe, “less is more” is a cardinal law.

6. Big and Bold

A catchy subject line, good design, and valuable content are not enough for a successful email campaign. Users rarely read an email; they scan it almost instantly and may not see key parts of it.

Your call-to-action (CTA) button should be big and bold.

Improving your CTA button is a never-ending task; it’s polished to get better conversion rates through A/B testing.

Check if your CTA button follows these pieces of advice:

• The button is immediately recognisable when the email is open.
• The copy of your button is personal, action-driven, and focused on benefits. “Enjoy my email marketing checklist” converts better than “Download your list.”
• The button is surrounded by negative space to make it visible.

7. Segmentation and Personalisation

You can’t call yourself a marketer if you haven’t heard about segmentation and personalisation.

For a huge list of email addresses, sending personalised messages is mandatory.

Segmentation means splitting the subscribers into groups with common interests. People gave you their email addresses in various ways. Therefore, you should adequately address them based on how you got their email addresses.

Let’s say that you got 100 email subscribers interested in a webinar about your product. Most likely, they are in the evaluation stage, almost ready to purchase what you have to sell. Sending an email with a good discount after watching the webinar is the best approach to convince them to buy.

On the other hand, let’s suppose that 200 other people subscribed to your blog posts. They appreciated the content quality and trusted you by giving you a valuable asset—their email address. In this case, you have to nurture the relationship before converting them. Sending them a free e-book about your area of expertise or a list of useful tools (including your product) might be a good start.

Email personalisation refers to crafting emails based on the data you have gathered from the email addresses’ owners. A “Good day John” intro sounds better than “Hi there, loyal subscriber,” doesn’t it? A good email feels like a message from a friend and not a salesy or annoying imperative to buy.

8. Use Automation Tools

Regardless of the talent and availability of a marketer, segmentation and personalisation require time – a lot of time! Automation tools for email marketing are on the rise, and using automation will soon be the norm.

This showcase of 20 automation tools should help you decide to adopt a solution. These tools save time and streamline the relationship with email recipients.

9. Track Data

Tracking data from your email campaign is as important as setting realistic goals. You can’t figure out if your goals have been accomplished without tracking data. The more data you obtain, the better! You can get primary data for free from your email service provider. Open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate are valuable information aimed at evaluating an email campaign.

If you’re launching your email campaign alongside another initiative (let’s say an influencer marketing campaign), you need to use influencer tools to help collect other information that your email platform can’t. They provide you additional insights to help you understand its overall performance.

10. Test, Test, Test

The needs of your leads and clients are constantly changing. You must keep the same rhythm or else they will quit your offer. Making small adjustments for each new email sent is a must-do approach. If it works better than the previous campaign, then keep it. Sometimes, a simple single tweak considerably improves the conversion rate.

These are my ten tips to run an efficient email marketing campaign. None of the above tips are revolutionary or breakthrough. Instead, by following these tips, your campaign will be positive.

You can use this article as a checklist before sending an email campaign. Marketers are always behind deadlines and may happen to forget to do some things. In this way, you can be sure that you don’t skip an important aspect.

This list is perfectible, and we are awaiting your contribution.