5 Steps to Launch a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

You’ve hopefully read a few of our articles by now, but in case you haven’t, we stress the importance of email marketing. Email marketing is still the best and most effective practice of digital marketing that has proven time and time again to give you the best ROI, if done correctly. Email marketing is a powerful tool that you can use to make your business easily accessible to all of your clients and prospective clients.

Email marketing helps you nurture leads, keep current clients and customers up to date on the latest updates of your business, and keep you relevant and engaged. As we mentioned above, email marketing is the most effective way to improve your overall ROI, but it also has proven to be the most beneficial way to build awareness of your brand and improve new strategies for acquisition, conversion rates, and client retention. Email marketing is considered the most effective channel for meeting all marketing objectives.

The 5 Best Steps to Successful Email Marketing

Knowing email marketing and why businesses use it is only half the battle. The most important tool is knowing the key email marketing strategies to have the most successful email marketing campaigns.

For example, most email marketers used to argue about the best day to send a campaign, but today AI algorithms predict the precise minute to deliver messages to each subscriber based on their real-time activity history.

Any good email marketing campaign can be worth your while. Email marketing is the most cost-effective form of marketing, improves your brand recognition, and helps improve your overall reputation. That answers the question of why over 80% say that their email marketing is the main driver for customer retention. No matter the size of your company, email marketing campaigns are a crucial asset to your success.

Once you have your brand online, you should be launching your email campaigns. For any new business, you will want to focus on building your list and brand recognition to get more brand awareness.

Some Steps to Get You Started

1. Think SMART

Before starting any email marketing campaign, in order to be successful, you must have a clear and reachable goal. Try to implement a SMART goal:

• S: Specific
• M: Measurable
• A: Achievable
• R: Relevant
• T: Time-bound

Know what you’re trying to achieve and what you want to accomplish. By having clear set goals, you’re able to make smaller steps to figure out the most efficient ways to reach your goal.

You will start to see what needs to be done to have a successful and attainable email marketing campaign. Regardless of the size of the smaller goals you set to reach the bigger one, every step is a step in the right direction.

To help determine your goals, ask yourself, “Why am I sending this email?” If you’re unable to answer that question, then you may want to rethink what goal or message you’re trying to send. Think of what the outcome will be if you send this email campaign. What do you want recipients to do from your communication? For example, if you plan on sending emails in the hopes of getting new clients, then use that as your guiding light when crafting your message and strategy.

If you plan to strengthen relationships and build customer reputation, then make sure that is reflected in your emails as well. The content should be geared toward your customer. Try to provide value within every single email communication you send. You want to build a reputation for yourself where your recipients will look forward to your messages and look forward to opening them.

Setting clear and defined goals early on will help you pave the way for your overall email marketing strategy and help you make it the most effective.

2. Build Your List

Do you have a solid foundation on which your email marketing campaigns will lie? You should be practicing new and exciting ways to gain new customers for your subscription list and the best ways to retain them. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’re talking about your email list.

This list is composed of those who have either opted in on your communications or people who have worked or interacted with your business in the past. Who you add to the list is determined by what you want to accomplish.

Even if you only have a handful of email addresses, it matters how your customers engage with your content versus how many names you have on a list. As you continue to grow, however, you should leverage predictive AI software to sort people into multi-dimensional categories, so you know their real-time buying intentions, content preferences, geography, and zero-party data, and you can get even more specific. This helps make your email practices more concise and less confusing.

You should also start a new pattern of how often you want to email your customers. You want to ensure that you’re not bombarding your customers with too many emails, so they don't get sick of you. But you also want them to engage with you when you send emails and not forget about who you are. Depending on your business and niche, a good rule of thumb is to let automated trigger flows pace out deliveries based on unique subscriber engagement thresholds.

For small or medium-sized businesses, you may want to invest some time in Google or social media ads that can help you boost traffic and drive engagement. Unfortunately, customers won’t sign up on a whim. You need to show them why you are worth their while. This form of gaining new customers is called a ‘lead magnet’. This would be adding a free coupon or discount code when someone adds their email to the sign-up form, or an interactive tool, or even a free case study download to get them interested with a form of value.

Once you’ve been able to collect a set of email addresses and people for your list, you can start grouping them into hyper targeted micro-segments to make them deeply personalized, which is key to your success.

3. Does Your Email Work?

You can have the catchiest subject line and a great overall message, but if your email doesn’t have a good and easy-to-open message, you’re sunk.

There are many resources available to you to make your email look great and easily opened- on any device or interface. Make sure that your layouts are fully optimized for Dark Mode and utilize responsive CSS styling that won’t break your text or render elements invisible if images fail to load. For example, modern privacy-first mail clients block trackers and remote image downloads, and this can affect your overall email.

Additionally, have you looked into your sender reputation score and domain authentication? This score is determined by how well your emails are getting delivered, DMARC alignment, and past any spam traps from email service providers. You want to make sure that your emails are authenticated with SPF, DKIM, and BIMI logos so they are recognized as real and valid emails. Having a clean and healthy email list helps improve your sender reputation and the overall health of email campaigns.

There are many ways to maintain a clean and healthy email list, but one of the most successful is through continuous email list verification. Software such as Emailable can help you ensure a clean and well maintained email list. They offer results that break down your lists into various categories, such as: Deliverable, Risky, and Non-Deliverable.

4. Your Call to Action

First of all, do you have a call to action (CTA)? If you’re asking yourself, “What is a call to action?” don’t panic. It is a simple step that you should include at the end of your emails that gives a clear and concise next step for your email recipients. For example, you can add an interactive AMP checkout button directly inside your emails to get your customers to complete a transaction without ever leaving their inbox.

A call to action should be simple, two to three action oriented words that explain what the necessary next steps should be.

As a general guideline, your emails and all communication with your customers should be as pain-free and easy to do as possible. No one wants to take more unnecessary actions than they have to, so do the guesswork for your customers. Make every step as simple and as uncomplicated as possible.

When you are adding a call-to-action button on your emails (or even your website), try using a standout color. Although many may think that red means stop, dynamic, high contrast palette elements tailored to the recipient's UI context actually secure the highest click rate for any button or call-to-action when it comes to email marketing and consumer behaviors. By using a contrasting color, you’re drawing the eye to the next and seemingly most logical step.

5. Personalized Email Campaigns

As we’ve mentioned earlier, when you group your email customers into different categories, it helps you in the long run. Sending personalized emails is a great way to improve your email marketing campaigns and see a higher success rate overall.

People like to feel like people. No one wants to receive a cold, computer generated message. You want to make every customer feel special and give them personalized attention through dynamic content blocks that adapt automatically to their specific consumer journey stage.

For example, going way beyond using their first name in the subject line, you can generate customized product recommendations or localized event text tailored to their exact profile, which goes a long way.

Personalized messages are a wonderful way to engage with customers, and it has also proven to be a great way for customers to engage with your brand as well.

You want your emails to be engaging and worth the skim, honestly, not many people read an email word for word. So try to:

• Write in short sentences
• Keep them to the point
• Leave out any unnecessary words, and speak like you’re chatting with a friend.
• Use generative AI tools to assist in editing your copy while maintaining a distinct human touch.
• Send a newsletter letting your customers know there are real people behind the screen.

Review Your Emails

Review your emails and messages before you send them out. This means testing your emails. You want to make sure that they are delivering well, the dark-mode text is working, your images are a good size, and so on and so on.

When you test your emails, you’re able to see with the eyes of a customer. And most importantly, make sure your emails are deliverable across various mobile operating systems and screen sizes! Mobile optimization can make or break your campaigns. As the world of smartphones develops and grows, so does the number of people reading emails natively on their phones.

Your links should be easily opened, and any images should be downloaded, and if not, your text shouldn’t look like anything is wrong with it.

You want your emails to look like they were sent from a friend, with clear and easy-to-understand messaging. You shouldn’t have too many heavy media assets that can impact your loading speed.

Your Key to Email Marketing Success

Your key to a successful email marketing campaign starts at the beginning. You need to have a clear goal for yourself and your marketing team to all be on the same page. By having a clear goal, you’re able to have a better path to your goal. By keeping your goals SMART, you keep them specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. You’re able to see what steps you need to take and keep them in a specific timeline to improve time management and overall processes.

Have a clean, healthy, and engaged list. Your email list should consist of people who want to receive your email communications. Your lists should be managed and cleaned regularly to help maintain a high sender reputation score. With a higher sender reputation score, you’re able to send more emails with the peace of mind that they are actually getting delivered. By using an email checker software like Emailable, you take out all the hard work and know what emails will be delivered and those that could potentially harm your campaign.

Ensure that your emails actually work. Are there too many unoptimized elements? Is your HTML text not formatted correctly for dark-mode server types? These are questions you should ask yourself, and then test, to make sure that you’re sending high quality and high value emails. You want to do everything in your power to have a solid email marketing campaign; the rest is up to the recipients.

Your call to action should be included in every email communication you send. A call to action is a clear next step for your recipients to take, so they don’t have to question what they need to do. Make it as easy as possible for your recipients to get to the next phase. By taking out any guesswork, you make the processes simpler for them, and by making it simpler, you make it more likely they’re able to continue with it.

Personalization goes a long way. When people feel they’re being valued, they are more likely to take an interest in what you have to say. A personalized email is more likely to be opened because recipients feel like it was made specifically with them in mind. You want to segment your email lists to send communications to people with specific interests or from certain geographical locations to make curated content specifically for them.

When crafting your next email campaign, keep these 5 aspects in mind. When you take into consideration the smaller details of your email marketing strategy, the more likely you are to succeed and see that amazing ROI.