Email marketing is fundamental to reaching your target audience effectively. We all understand the importance of it, but what exactly makes an email marketing campaign successful? In this blog post, we’ll share some of our best practices and advice on how to run a successful email marketing campaign.

Factors that contribute to a successful email marketing campaign

1. Email content

You can have a successful email marketing campaign without having great email content. From the design of the email to the information within, all components relating to the content of your email must add value to your message. Whether it is making a promotional email for a special discounted offer or a simple informative newsletter it is very important to construct your email in such a way that the recipient is interested in the message.

Making your message clear, informative, and simple goes a long way toward a successful email marketing campaign by contributing positively to your most important KPIs (key performance indicators) and overall campaign metrics.

2. Attractive subject line

Now that you developed the perfect body and content for your email to aid you in your email campaign, it is important to add a subject line that does it justice. The subject line must be representative of the content of the email and essentially it must deliver the most important pieces of information you’re trying to convey right from the get-go. If your email does not have an attractive subject line, it might not be opened by the recipient and just outright ignored.

It is imperative to grab the attention of your audience to maximize your open rates and overall email marketing success.

3. Personalize your emails

Personalization is something that we have addressed many times in this blog, and the reason we bring it up again is due to the fact that personalization will contribute immensely to your email marketing efforts. Little things from including the recipient’s name on the email content to grab their attention have shown to contribute very positively to open rates and engagement rates.

4. Segment your email lists

Writing amazing content, a killer subject line, and adding some cool personalization touches is great for your email marketing campaign. However, this can all go to waste if you fail to direct your marketing efforts to the right audience. Studying, analyzing, and determining which segments of your audience are more likely to get the best possible value from your message is essential to contribute to the success of your email marketing. The more relevant the audience is to the value proposition, the more likely your campaign is to perform with good metrics.

5. Speaking of metrics, measure them

There are certain email marketing metrics that need to be measured crucially to determine the overall success of your campaign. Some examples of these messages are:

Open rates

They are calculated based on the percentage of recipients that open your emails when compared to how many emails you sent out. This metric is important because it tells you how many people are doing the very first step of engaging with your email marketing, which is precise to open the email once received.

Unsubscribe rates

They are very important to measure, this metric tells you how many people no longer want to engage with your content. This metric can help you understand and diagnose any mistakes you might be making, whether it is during the segmentation process or when building your content or call to action. It isn’t ideal when people unsubscribe, but it is important to determine why they do it, to prevent it from happening in the future.

Click-through rates

Measuring your click-through rate shows you essential information about how many people are actively engaging with your email’s content, despite whether they are completing the full conversion path or not.

Conversion rate

This metric is essential to understand how many members of your audience are following through with your designed CTA (call to action) - we’ll talk more about the call to action in a little bit! - measuring conversion allows you to assess how well you’re performing in the current email marketing campaign you’re running.

Bounce rate

Ideally, you would have no bounces on your email marketing campaign. At the very least, you want to keep your bounce rate at or below the industry standard of 2%. If your bounce rate is going above this percentage value, you might want to consider looking more deeply into email verification in order to protect your sender reputation, campaign metrics, and overall return on investment.

6. Verify your email lists

We can’t mention bounce rates without jumping straight to email verification. This is definitely one of the most important steps you need to take in order to make your email marketing campaign successful.

Verifying your list of email addresses right before your campaign goes out will prevent undesirable hard and soft bounces, as well as keep your sender reputation safe. Through email verification you will maximize your return on investment during your email marketing, all the while making sure your metrics are not influenced by sending emails to undesirable addresses that will either open, click-through, or be conversed with your call to action.

7. Your call to action must be obvious and clear

Having a great call to action implies several elements:

• Visual clarity: use big bold letters, bright colors, and great placement for your CTAs. Need your customer to click through a link? Make that a big button and center it in your layout. If nothing else, your CTA needs to be immediately visible.
• Obvious message: use simple and easy-to-understand words to describe your CTA, and make sure you’re transmitting as much information as possible about what it is you want your audience to do, and what the outcome of doing it is.
• Easy to follow: make it so that your CTA, when engaged with it, takes your audience through the process of getting to the end goal with as little attrition as possible. Take your audience directly to the finish line, ideally in a single click. If you add multiple steps to your CTA, it is very likely that some members of your segmented audience will abandon the process midway through.

8. Test your emails whenever possible with A/B testing

A/B testing is a great way to determine the effectiveness of your email marketing and it gives you a great opportunity to optimize performance, even for different segments of your audience.

A/B testing is a simple testing methodology that consists of testing two different versions of the same email content, CTA, subject line, or any other element of your message. Different segments will have different preferences, adjusting something as simple as the main color palette of your email will yield different results in different markets, regions, and age groups.

The greatest advantage of A/B testing is that you’re not only learning how these different preferences affect your own email marketing, specifically, you’re also learning which ones don’t. This allows you to focus on the more impactful ones for the future.

9. Set realistic goals and expected outcomes

It is very hard to measure success without knowing what you’re aiming for. Before even considering sending out any emails, take some time to determine what objectives you have with your upcoming email marketing campaign.

We understand that this might seem like very obvious advice, but it cannot be repeated enough times. We understand that it is easy to get caught up in the excitement of the creative process of a new email marketing campaign. However, by establishing pre-existing goals and expectations, not only are you much more likely to design your campaign around those goals, which makes you more likely to succeed, but also you’re setting yourself up for realistic expectation management, preventing any unnecessary disappointment when measuring your campaign results.

10. If you can, automate it

There are so many tools, services, and complementary solutions to help you improve your email marketing that it would be neglectful to not take advantage of the plethora of automation services available to aid you in your email marketing efforts.

Being on par with the latest technologies and automation methods will contribute very positively to your email marketing, by increasing your efficiency and lowering the total workload required to develop, execute, monitor, and analyze your email marketing campaigns.

In summary

Let’s review the 10 best practices mentioned in this article:

1. Work on your email content.
2. Create an awesome subject line
3. Personalize your emails to your audience
4. Find out who your audience is through segmentation
5. Measure important metrics
6. Verify your email lists!
7. Design a great call to action
8. Run A/B testing to optimize performance
9. Pre-plan and establish realistic goals and expectations
10. If you can automate something, do it. It saves time, effort, and money.

We hope this article has proved useful in increasing and developing your email marketing knowledge even further. Following these 10 steps will definitely help to make your email marketing more successful.

Happy Emailing!