The Best Way to Start Your Email Marketing Campaigns

All email marketers are thinking of the most effective and innovative ways to reach their audience. Regardless of what your product or service may be, the main goal is to have people receive, open, and perform whatever call to action you want. Regardless of whether you’re a new or experienced marketer, you still need to have a solid foundation of how to write an email campaign in order to be successful.

To start, an email campaign is a sequence of marketing efforts that will contact multiple recipients at once in hopes of them performing the desired action. Email campaigns are designed to reach many subscribers at the best time, provide valuable information, and relevant offers. By using an email campaign, you will further the trust between you and your customers.

To get started, the first step is to decide what your goal is

This is what will determine your setup and execution of an email marketing campaign. Without a clear goal, it will be hard for anyone who is working on this project to know if they’re doing the right tasks. Your goal should be clear, simple, and concrete. A few examples:

• Get recipients to sign up for our monthly newsletter
• Get recipients to buy a specific product that is on promotion
• Get recipients to try our new service

By incorporating email analytics for your email campaigns, it will also allow you to track how many people are actually taking action. This is how you can measure the success of your campaigns.

Understand the different types of emails you will send.

As a rule of thumb, there are three key email types. We are familiar with promotional emails, those that talk about offers and sales, and our self-promotional. Next, we have relational emails that give subscribers things that you have promised. These would be something like a Weekly Newsletter, a free gift, the latest blog post, or any relevant information they can use. Keep in mind with these emails there should always be an added value to the recipient. Lastly, we have transactional, these emails are classified as subscriber signup confirmations, order or purchase confirmations, welcome messages, or an acknowledgment of subscribers’ change of information. Typically transactional emails are triggered by subscribers’ actions and relate to an action that has been taken on your website. Now that you have determined what type of emails you can send you can move on to who you’re actually sending these email campaigns to.

Next, determine who you are writing to

This next step is very important because it will dictate how the rest of your email campaign will be set up. Make sure you know your audience, when writing ask yourself questions like, is this email for an experienced user or for someone who just signed up? This will also help determine the tone and voice your writing will have. once you have figured out who you’re writing to try to make these email campaigns as personable as possible. Personalization is key when it comes to email marketing. The best way for personalization is by segmenting your lists. list segmentation is dividing your email list into categories. These categories can be anything from age, location, or profession. The more segmented the list the more personalized emails you will be able to write.

Now, let’s start crafting your email campaigns

You now have a clear idea of the purpose of your email, who you were writing to oh, and with what goal in mind. now you’re able to start writing the email copy. There is not just one handbook on how to write an email copy but this beginner’s guide will keep it short, sweet, and to the point. When drafting your copy here are a few key points to keep in mind:

• Be sure to stick to the point. Get your point across without adding unnecessary fluff. People do not want to read through paragraphs and paragraphs to understand the point of your email. No one has that kind of time, especially from non-work-related emails. If you do have a lot of valuable content to offer, try breaking it down into bullet points.
• Provide value in every email you send. For example, you may only send promotional emails but this comes with a risk. People tend to lose interest quickly if they know you’re only trying to sell them something. Try providing some value to them to keep your readers interested such as a monthly newsletter or helpful tips to better use your product or service.
• Make your text scannable. An email is a great place to use bulleted lists, bolds, underlines, or italics. This makes it easier for the readers to find the important information in your emails. Be sure not to go overboard though, only use my necessary.
• Have a clear and powerful CTA. The call to action is the next step a user should take. make this easy for your recipients and give them a clear button that will take them to their next step. Do not make them do any unnecessary work. Make sure your CTA is easy to identify and very visible.
• Personalize when possible. If you’ve collected a list of hundreds or thousands, do your best to segment these lists and make each email have a personal touch. When a reader sees their first name they are much more likely to open or pay more attention to what you’re saying.
• Control your tone of voice. It is not only what you’re saying but how you say it. Sometimes adding a dry or sarcastic tone can work wonders but be sure to use it conservatively. Not everyone wants to read about your funny jokes in an email when explaining your raising prices.
• Once you have your first rough draft down, revise it carefully. Revise a few times actually. Make sure spelling and grammar are perfect. Make sure all roads lead to the intended goal. Meaning, your email campaign is working towards your goal.

Get creative

You are able to get creative when crafting your email campaigns. Some eye-catching artwork can help improve your email campaigns. Try to avoid stock photos when possible and make sure that the image fit correctly with your template. By adding a few images it can greatly increase your click-through rate however don’t go overboard because this can increase file size and decrease deliverability. Industry standards suggest that you keep your total email size under 102k. Additionally, make sure the artwork aligns with the goal of your email.

Although this is a beginner’s guide, it is also important to note that having a responsive design is an important part of coding your emails. You cannot stress enough how important it is that your email looks aesthetically pleasing for every client on every device. A responsive design will help you control the appearance of your email campaigns on mobile devices making sure readers don’t just delete your carefully crafted content. Using email analytics will also help you determine if responsive design is actually a necessity for your audience, as it depends.

Track your email campaigns

Tracking your email campaigns is the best way to measure the success of your campaigns. Your email service provider may offer their own data analytics so you can see what options you have.

Many beginning marketers are curious about how email analytics work. The most basic idea is that a 1x1 pixel image (AKA tracking pixel) is added just before the closing body tag of the email. When an image is loaded by the reader, the image request is then logged by the server. Based on the number of requests that are collected by the analytics service, you can generate statistics on the email open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates oh, and many more.

In advanced analytics, you can also track how long a user has had this email open. That is also called an engagement score and can be used and added to other contexts such as click-through rates and the number of opens. This helps determine the engagement you have from your email marketing list. After gathering all of this information you will want to review it and use the insights to further your email marketing campaigns.

When studying these statistics that you’ve received, you should also be keeping track of users who have not opened your emails in the last 6 months. These users are probably not engaged or interested in your information and can possibly harm your sender reputation score if you continue to send emails to them.

As a rule of thumb and recommendation, we suggest that you always have a clean and healthy email marketing list. You may have a list of hundreds or thousands that is very impractical to go through each and every email to ensure that it’s a valid email. Fortunately, there are services out there that are able to clean your list for you. These Services help Ensure that you stay off any Blacklists and stay away from any spam traps. The services will check the syntax of each email along with many other factors that will determine whether an email is deliverable, risky, no longer in use, etc…

Emailable, Is a great service that will go through your list and be able to determine what emails are deliverable. Emailable will help Improve your deliverability and email marketing campaign ROI as the most reliable and affordable email checker.

Final steps

Now that you have crafted your email campaign, set up a goal, determined who you are sending these emails to and what kind of emails they are, cleaned your email marketing list, and studied your Analytics you are now able to analyze the results and find room for improvement. If you haven’t already, you should be testing your emails. What this means is you are sending out similar emails that have a couple of differences between them such as their subject line or a different image in the body of the text. Once you start receiving your analytics you’re able to determine which email is performing better and you’re able to study why. This helps determine how your audience reacts to your email campaigns and the best way to reach your audience to achieve your goals.