An effective email marketing campaign is essential for the success of an online business. Email marketing has overtaken direct mail as is much cheaper, more measurable and better targeted. With email marketing, you will be able to expand your contact database and nurture your existing contacts for enhanced services. The benefits that come with email marketing are not unknown but unfortunately, a lot of spammers have abused email marketing. Thus, people are now difficult to reach, let alone a response or action from them. Today, we discuss about the essentials for creating an effective email marketing campaign. You, as a marketer, need to be much more creative to get the messages through the targeted audience.
1) Plan your marketing strategies
It is important to plan out the email campaign by considering factors like target audience, your objectives, your budget and how to implement the campaign. It is vital to identify the main aim of your email campaign. For example, do you want to raise awareness of your products or improve custom retention?
2) Choose Email marketing provider
You can engage a third party to design and build email for you. You can try different providers and choose the ones that you find the most suitable for your needs. Some of the popular providers are:
3) Short and crisp
The email should neither be too long nor too short. The most simplified the more effectively it will be. You should keep the design attractive and use more text than images, may be a ratio of 80:20 for text: images. The design elements should focus on the most important part of your copy.
4) Special attention to the subject line
To maximize the open rate of your email, you need to write a good subject line. It’s the first thing that a customer sees and decides whether to read the email and directly move it to junk without even opening it. Avoid using words like free as it might trigger spam filters. Personalize the subject line and try to include your company name as well. Make sure it’s not too long.
5) Design is important
Proper designing is essential to achieve the aim of your email marketing campaign. Here are some of the useful tips:
- Placement of logo in upper left is a good choice.
- Keep scrolling to the minima.
- Don’t use too many colors or fonts in the copy.
- Images and text should be clickable.
- Copy should be easily scannable.
- A clear call to action so that audience knows what to do next.
- Avoid spam words like urgent, free, order now.
- Make it memorable and actionable
- Don’t forget to include your company name
6) Track your email campaigns
Creating a strong email campaign isn’t just enough. You also need to track the progress of your campaigns and thus, it is vital to setup the proper tracking. This will help you to maximize your ROI. Some of the metrics for tracking the progress can be through your email provider’s dashboard and you can also use Google Analytics to access deliverability, open rate, click through rate and conversion rate. All this form an essential part of your online success.
7) Test and Improve
To get the best results, you should try out different combinations and decide work best for your business. You should track, test and improve subject lines, style and content of copy used. You can also try out different font sizes, colors and formatting. Different calls to action are also worth trying out.
How to do you create email marketing campaigns? What has been best for your business? Let us know your view in the comments section below.