9 Tips for Running a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

To run a successful business requires branding and outreach from many different platforms including websites, social media, and more than likely, an email marketing campaign. An email campaign lets you send your message directly to current or possible customers, using customized templates that represent your brand.

Marketing services exist that make creating the campaign relatively easy and even offer customer service agents to help you. However, there are still a few things to know and some tips you can use to help you get the most from your email marketing campaign.

1) Define Your Objective

As with just about any project, the first key step is to define the objective. This is often skipped, but defining the objective before you start will provide the direction to the rest of the campaign and help you focus on what is important.

This is when you start to think about how the subject line connects to information inside, who your audience is going to be, what the information in the body of the email conveys etc.…

When defining the objective, focus on your target audience and think about them, your message, and your brand. What is the target audience’s concerns? What content will provide them with the most value? Thinking about your target audience will help guide you to a meaningful objective and campaign.

2) Pick an Email Marketing Service Based on Your Objectives

With a defined objective and a better idea of what you want to accomplish with this campaign, you can move onto the next step of selecting an email marketing service.

There are a wide variety of email marketing providers and the all have their benefits and features. This also means which service is right for you depends on what you are hoping to accomplish. Some offer simplicity, others offer amazing analytics and others find a niche in interfacing with social media.

Regardless, you will need to do some research and compare your objectives to their offerings and find the service that will work the best for you.

3) Subject Line Clarity

The subject line needs to tell the reader precisely what is going to be inside the email. If the subject line indicated one thing, and the content doesn’t follow through, the recipient is done and your email is probably instantly deleted, maybe even with a little note in the recipient’s mind to not open any other emails from you either.

Use a clear subject line that indicates a benefit to opening the email, and creates an emotion like curiosity, urgency that gets them to open it. Then follow through with content that makes them want to follow through to your landing page. Click rates maybe a little lower, but getting people to follow through to your landing page, called conversions, is what the professional concentrates on.

4) Create a Call to Action!

Speak directly to your audience with a concise email that clearly describes what the benefit of clicking on the link to your landing page is. “Everything is on sale” is ok, but “30% off your purchase” is more direct and provides a clear benefit to following through to your landing page.

You need to create a call to action by indicating an immediate benefit and even emotional benefit. Remember, most people just can’t avoid following through on curiosity. Indicating that there is more valuable content, like a sale coupon, if they just click through drives them to your goal which is opening a browser window on your landing page!

5) Have A Clean List

Don’t just randomly spam everyone whose email you happen to have access to. Target segments and then keep track of them. Add those segment fields in your email tools and then track them back against your ecommerce software for results. Create an offer specifically for one segment of your offerings, use your e-commerce to decide who that is, and then send that group the email and actually calculate how effective you were.

Speaking of tracking and measuring, that brings us to the next set of tips, analytics. These are the tools you can use to measure and refine your email marketing campaigns strategy to be the most effective. More effective email campaigns cost less, and generate more sales. Analytics are the keys to doing that.

6) A/B Test

A/B testing is an old and very established marketing analytic. Come up with two versions of the same concept and do a test run using both. Then simply look at the metrics and see if one performed more effectively. Move forward for the rest of your email marketing campaign with the one that worked the best. Simple, elegant and easy to understand and do.

7) OR – Open to Send Ratio

This one is another simple analytic that’s self-explanatory. How many emails did you send versus how many were opened. Better segment targeting and design should lead to higher ratios.

There are many benchmarks to compare your OR ratio to and a lot of it depends on the market and type of campaign. It might be best just to measure where you are currently at, and then set increasing, incremental goals for yourself.

8) CTOR- Click to Open Rate

CTOR is the next level of measuring your email campaign effectiveness. The OR measured how many emails were opened, this one measures how many “openings” lead to a conversion.
Not every email marketing platform will have reporting for this analytic, so you may have to do a little tracking and calculating yourself, but it will be well worth the effort as you learn to refine your campaigns.

9) Measure Success

Marketing plans should always include a way to measure effectiveness and success, email marketing campaigns are no different. Use the analytics above to help you measure that. Take some time to learn about other Google analytics that help measure success and get a better idea of how all the piece’s funnel together.

Use the tips above to define your objective, provide clear messaging and then measure your results. It won’t take long, and you will be an email marketing wizard.

Today’s guest post for the Startup Page was written by:
Charlotte McCleary is a message-centric brand strategist who works with the marketing teams of start-ups and young companies to streamline their market positioning and message. When not crafting blue prints for marketers she is a key note speaker and personal branding coach. Twitter