Creating effective and yet easy email marketing strategies on a tight timeline requires a combination of planning and implementation. Using the right tools such as Groupmail does a lot to help with your email marketing, but it’s important to have objectives, deliverable and targets for your campaigns otherwise your attempts will fall flat.
All you need to know to get started with email marketing is covered in this step-by-step email marketing Guide. Let’s get started on how to effectively start and continue your email marketing campaign and strategies.
Step 1: Establish measurable objectives.
Define what you want to do with each of your email campaigns. Do you want to increase sales with your emails or improve overall user engagement? You may also want to explore sending re-engagement emails to tidy up your email list and improve your retention numbers.
Once you’ve determined the “why” behind your email marketing plan, it’s time to configure (and document) your targets. Some simple and easy to track targets can be:
- In six months from now, you will boost your open rate by 25%.
- Measure who signs up for your product/service through your email campaign to increase conversion rates, and so on.
Step 2: Pick an email template or create your own.
The next step in designing an effective and easy email marketing campaign is deciding whether you’ll create each one from scratch or use pre-made and customisable email templates. In a limited timeline, the latter choice can offer a much uniform and professional version of your email campaigns.
Consider using an email template as a go-to email layout unless you have the time and money to create an email campaign from scratch every time. You can purchase them, download them for free, or hire an email designer and developer to do the job. Whatever option you select, having a prototype will make your job as an email marketer a lot easier!
Better yet use Groupmails built-in editor to create custom email templates that match your brand and design ideas. This powerful tool allows you to customise your emails using HTML.
Step 3: Compose an appealing email.
Email copywriting requires time, effort, and focus. Consider addressing each part of the email copy separately to make the job less daunting. Before a recipient opens your email, the following content pieces appear:
- From the: Name
- The subject line
- The preview text
Attractive subject lines, preview messages, and a personalised approach all are necessary to persuade a recipient to access your email.
The headlines, body, and CTA are the next pieces of content your recipient sees after deciding to open your email.
Write your body copy first, then your headline, and finally your CTA. There are no set rules for content creation, except for grammar and style guides. They form the most creative part of an easy email marketing campaign process.
Step 4: Follow email rules to avoid ending up in the spam folder.
Even if your email campaigns are visually appealing and interactive, some receivers may wish to unsubscribe—a mailbox is a crowded place.
Although creating an unsubscribe option may appear to be a minor step, neglecting to provide a way for your recipients to opt-out from your email marketing campaigns can have dire effects on deliverability and sender reputation.
Ensure you follow email best practices and laws to ensure your emails are delivered correctly and that recipients can opt-out easily. This creates a better customer reputation and brand awareness for your business.
Step 5: Go through your email marketing plan, test it, and then send it out.
Creating and using a pre-send email checklist reduces the likelihood of distributing email campaigns that might contain errors. Before sending out an email marketing campaign, make sure to double-check spellings/content copy, links, and browser compatibility.
At the very least, send a test email to at least a couple of people so they can look through the text, verify the links, and look over the overall layout of your email marketing campaign.
A/B test your audience with a segmented list. Use the analytics to decide which email and approach works better and has a higher ROI.
Powerful group tools and analytics such as does within Groupmail help make testing easier.
Step 6: Timing it right
After you’ve thoroughly read your email, it’s time to share or plan your campaigns. Can you submit it now or wait until later? This decision would be based on where most of your recipients live, as well as whether you see higher interaction on certain days or at certain times of the day.
Emailing at the start of the hour is not a good idea. Transmitting at “off hours”, such as 8 or 22 minutes past the hour, decreases the likelihood of your emails being delayed if ISPs, such as Gmail or Yahoo, are experiencing a spike in email traffic.
Understand your audience, where they are and what they are doing. Testing can help with this and so to can consistency.
If a reader expects an email at a certain time and certain day, then ensure that you deliver.
Step 7: Evaluate the outcomes.
You’ll probably feel a sense of relief once you’ve organised or shared your email marketing campaign. A lot of your job is finished (at least before you start planning another email campaign!). But don’t forget to spend just as much time monitoring your email campaigns as you do while creating them.
Thankfully, email marketing strategies generate a plethora of data that can be used to assess the health of your email campaign. The following are some leading figures to keep in mind:
- Unique accesses
- Click-through rates
- Un-subscription rates
- Spamming grievances
You don’t have to keep track of every variable provided, but you can ensure you’re trailing the same 4 or 5 metrics for each campaign to get an accurate picture of how your campaigns are faring.
Final word
As you acquire more experience generating email marketing campaigns, you’ll become more efficient and develop insights into what works for your email program. Although it may seem daunting at first, following the steps listed in our guide to easy email marketing will help place your campaigns right and accomplish precisely what you are intending to do.