Whether you are a beginner or you just want to launch a new product/service soon, a well-conceived and implemented email marketing campaign is the perfect tool to promote your business or interests.
Email marketing is one of the most popular and productive e-commerce tools we have today and for a good reason. It helps you reach as many people as you want/can in a matter of seconds, without too much hassle or efforts.
Running an effective email marketing campaign requires following some specific steps. Around 270 billion emails are sent on a daily basis throughout the world, so succeeding in getting yours opened and read is hard business.
Here’s a quick guide to running a productive campaign:
Make a plan and write down your expectations. Email marketing campaigns have several purposes: to get you more subscribers, wake up subscribers you already have but are idle, tighten up your relationship with your existing subscribers, segmenting them in order to be able to send more targeted campaigns in the future, reminding your audience of your existence, in case you weren’t that active lately, give a bonus to your subscribers and more. You have to know exactly what your goals are before you start your campaign.
Make time to get to know your customers. It is very important to understand who your subscribers are, what needs and preferences they have. Use specialized tools such as Google Analytics or Insights from Facebook to gather data on your audience, so that you will know how to shape your campaign.
Choose the best email marketing service for your needs. There are a lot of choices out there, so you’ll have enough to choose from. Some of the best providers on the market right now are Constant Contact, GetResponse, AWeber, MailChimp and others.
Think of a great subject line. As we’ve already mentioned, hundreds of billions of emails are sent every day across the world. Stop and just think about how your inbox looks like every day. Do you bother to open and read every single mail that you receive? Let’s face it: only the special, catchy ones make it through and the first thing your users are going to see when you send an email is the subject line. A strong, punchy subject line has the power to obtain that click in a second, so make sure you put a lot of thought into it.
Write interesting, concise content. Your subject line isn’t the only important part. Your content has to also be short, simple and interesting, because no one wants to waste their time reading endless emails or mails they don’t understand. Also try not to exaggerate with text and use as many images/videos as possible, because according to studies, they are more appreciated than using simple text. You should also call to action and redirect users to a relevant landing page on your website.
Know when to send your emails. You might need to run a few informative campaigns before building that successful one, because you need to gather and analyze useful data on aspects like open rate, CTR (click through rate) and so on. It is very important to know what the best time is to send your emails or what the optimal frequency is. You have to analyze your demographics and know what the time zone is for the majority of it, because timing your emails is very crucial. You also don’t want to send too little emails, but you don’t want to transform into a spammer either.