Email Marketing: How to Create a Successful Email Campaign
Want to build customer loyalty and increase sales? Invest in email marketing.
Best way to communicate with your audience, email campaigns are a powerful marketing strategy.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is an email sent from a company to one or more potential customers.
While everything in the digital world seems to change fast, the use of email remains unwavering.
An article on why email marketing isn’t dead reveals that 90% of adults and 74% of teenagers still use email regularly.
This makes email marketing the perfect tool for creating a customer relationship, generating leads, and increasing sales.
But before you run a successful email marketing campaign, you need planning and preparation. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do this.
1. Define your Goals
The first thing to do is set goals.
To get started, think about what you want to achieve with your emails, such as:
- Getting new subscribers to generate leads;
- Nurture existing leads by providing something they value;
- Convince inactive customers to buy with you again;
- Target your audience so you can send more focused and assertive proposals and offers.
An email marketing campaign is usually conducted in stages, with different content, but the ultimate goal is always the conversion.
2. Know the Different Types of Email
It is important to know what types of email you can send.
The most common, with which we are all familiar, are the promotional emails, which talk about offers, products and services.
Then there are relationship emails that focus on giving something of value to the subscriber, such as a newsletter, a gift, relevant information they can use, and so on.
– How to create a newsletter that converts
There are also transactional emails, which include:
- Subscriber registration confirmation;
- Welcome message;
- Confirmation of purchase;
- Request for review;
- Validation of changes to subscriber information.
Generally, transactional emails are triggered automatically by the actions of users subscribed to your website.
3. Use Technology Wisely
The best email marketing services are implemented through tools developed for this function, such as MailChimp.
– How to create email campaigns with MailChimp
When choosing a software to create your campaign, see if it offers features like:
- Easy creation and automation of campaigns, including templates and workflows.
- Integrations with software you already use, such as WordPress and OptinMonster.
- Ways to segment your audience.
- Performance analysis tools.
Features like the MailChimp automations illustrated below will help you schedule transactional emails, blog-driven updates, respond quickly to customers, and create and deliver promotional and relational emails.
4. Create Great Optins
In summary, “Optins” is the necessary authorization, given by an individual, to receive e-mail communications from a particular company.
For this to happen, you’ll need to create attractive, attention-grabbing signature forms, and encourage people to sign up.
Try different types of forms on different parts of your site, including:
- Welcome pop-up, which appear when people arrive at your site.
- Pop-ups that can appear on any page and temporarily blank out the rest of the content to focus on optin.
- Banners on the sides of the site.
- Exit intent pop-ups, which appear when people are about to leave the site.
For best results, place optins in multiple places and determine rules for them to appear and targeting criteria.
This reduces the level of annoyance while maintaining effectiveness.
5. Plan a Schedule
Many companies receive new subscribers with a small series of emails to help them get to know your products and services.
This sequence is usually as follows:
- Welcome.
- Products/services that the company offers.
- Company news.
- Some offer or advantage to encourage the reader to take action.
Do not overload your subscribers by sending emails too often. This will send them directly to the spam box.
Inserting a button so the user can unsubscribe, if desired, is also important as it demonstrates respect for the customer and builds trust.
Once you outline your email marketing plan, it’s time to start writing.
6. Make your Best in Subject Line
The subject line plays a crucial role in getting people to open and click on your emails.
As the title of a blog post, the subject of the email needs to draw attention so people want to go further.
Data Campaign Monitor show that the subject lines that most converts have between 41 to 50 characters.
Some tips for creating good topics are:
- Telling people what they will receive when they open your email;
- Add personalization, such as including people’s names in the subject line;
- Avoid spam trigger words so your emails make it to the inbox.
7. Prepare the Copywriting
It’s finally time to write the text of your email marketing. Time to create an engaging and effective copywriting.
For best results, in the beginning, keep the text short, clear and avoid launching your offer too soon. You want people to feel comfortable first.
Greet subscribers by name. Personalized emails are more successful.
Other ideas for improving your copywriting are:
- Develop a personal story. This makes the reader create an emotional connection with your brand.
- Offer something of value to your readers. It can be content, some useful information or special offer.
- The use of GIF or video keeps readers more involved.
- Create attention-grabbing signature.
Lastly, the last part of your email marketing copywriting is the call to action (CTA).
Your CTA is what you want people to do when they read your email and it can appear more than once during the text.
8. Focus on Design
The layout is a fundamental part of a successful email marketing campaign.
It reflects the image of your company and therefore determines the impression your reader will have of your brand.
With more people than ever reading emails on mobile devices, it ‘s important to use a responsive template so your email is automatically resized.
Another factor to watch out for is that, while images are more attractive, many people turn off their viewing in emails.
For this reason, it is important to invest more in the text than in the use of images.
Our tip: Remember to use alt tags to describe the images used, so the people who disabled them will know what’s there.
9. Test and Follow Up
And when you think that now you just have to send it, it’s not really so easy.
This is only the first step, the first test.
To create a truly effective email marketing campaign, you need to test and collect data.
That means sending and seeing how everything works: design, copywriting, subject lines, and calls-to-action.
You’ll also need to monitor email analytics from your service provider relating to opens, clicks, unsubscribes and forwards.
This will allow you to discover what is working and what is not.
Another problem to be monitored is your sender reputation, which affects email deliverability.
Use the Sender’s Score to see if there are red signs that might prevent your emails from reaching your subscribers’ inboxes.
Finally, manage your subscriber list by trying to reengage inactive subscribers and removing them if your attempts fail.
It is best for email marketers to have higher opening and clickthrough rates with fewer active subscribers, than keeping a large number of inactive ones.
Why use MailChimp in your Email Marketing Campaign
Excellent resource for promoting online business, MailChimp is an extremely attractive option for anyone who is starting their email marketing strategy.
Developed to enable sending email to thousands of addresses at the same time, the tool allows free sending to up to 2000 subscribers.
Easy to use, you can create HTML email templates without any coding. And to improve, the service integrates nicely with various platforms, such as WordPress.
Among the features and advantages that MailChimp offers, we can mention:
- Sending email to an unlimited number of recipients at once;
- Higher deliverability;
- Privacy laws;
- Professional layout;
- Compatible with multiple readers and devices;
- Seamless integration with other applications and services;
- Performance analysis.
Simple and intuitive, those who create online courses and do not understand anything about design do not have to worry.
Just choose a template and then define the layout and text using the drag-and-drop resource.
The software provides a variety of basic templates to get you started.
MailChimp also allows you to easily organize your subscribers through lists, which are the basis of every email marketing campaign.
That way you can get in touch and develop a relationship with your students by maintaining a professional look and a sending schedule, which strengthens your Inbound strategy.
– How to use Inbound Marketing
With a well-planned and aligned email marketing campaign, you will soon have your first students.
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