Nearly 4 billion people use email worldwide.

Moreover, active email accounts worldwide are around 5.59 billion. Ever since its advent, email, or electronic mail has been extensively used by students, working professionals, companies (In fact, almost everyone) to communicate with each other for both formal and informal purposes.

With so many people using it daily, email can be a fantastic way to boost your business.

Yes, an email marketing campaign can do wonders when it comes to attracting new customers, sharing promos and discounts, increasing brand awareness, making your existing clients keep coming back and so much more. In this post, we are going to take a look at Email Marketing and How to create and run a successful email marketing campaign for your business. Let’s dive in!

WHAT IS EMAIL MARKETING?

Email marketing, in simple terms, is a marketing strategy where you send a commercial message or email, typically to your customers who have “opted in” or “subscribed” to your emails. It is done with the aim to promote a business’s products and services. However, different businesses can have different marketing goals. It can include newsletters, information about promotions and sales, deals for subscribers, and so on.

It is a great way of marketing that can help educate the audience on the value of your brand, keep your customers informed and aware, and communicate with them. It also helps you to target a specific set of customers or even specific individuals. Not only this, it can also help you drive traffic to your business website, social media accounts, or anywhere else you’d like your customers to visit.

In short, email marketing is a crucial part of your marketing strategy. But, creating and running an effective and  successful email marketing campaign is not easy. Fret not! The following tips will help you in creating and running a successful email marketing campaign for your business.

HOW TO CREATE AND RUN AN EFFECTIVE AND SUCCESSFUL EMAIL MARKETING CAMPAIGN FOR YOUR BUSINESS?

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

Before starting with your email marketing campaign, it is important to study your audience. The more you know about your audience, the better it is for your business and for your email campaign! It will help you in building your list and in curating the relevant content. Creating a marketing persona will help you greatly in achieving this.

You can take the help of data from Google Analytics and your social media profiles – to know about your customers, demographics, locations, and interests.

IDENTIFY YOUR EMAIL MARKETING GOALS

Depending on the size and the nature of your business, your marketing goals can be different. For a new business, it may be aimed at building brand awareness. For a well-established business, the main aim of an email marketing campaign can be about promoting new products, discounts and about attracting the new as well as the already existing customers. So, identifying your goals will give you a clear picture of what you want to achieve by running an email marketing campaign.

Some common email marketing goals are welcoming new subscribers and customers, boosting engagement, nurturing existing subscribers and customers, re-engaging subscribers and customers, segmenting your subscribers, etc.

BUILD YOUR EMAIL LIST

An email list (also known as the mailing list or subscriber’s list) is basically a list containing the email addresses that you have received through your blog or website. In other words, it is a list of contacts who have consented to receive your email updates. You can use these email databases to send marketing material to multiple recipients. It is one of the first and most important steps in email marketing. You cannot execute email marketing if you have no contacts to send your emails to.

For this purpose, you can make use of tools like Monster Leads that will help you in building your email list and to reach out to your leads.

FIND AN EMAIL MARKETING PLATFORM

After you are done with building your mailing list, it’s time to find the most appropriate email marketing platform. An email marketing platform is also known as an email service provider or simply an email tool. They let you create and send emails, newsletters, and other email promotions to your mailing list. They are easy to use and many ESPs will also offer a free version of the email software so that you can get used to its functioning. The email marketing platform also provides you with pre-made email templates, manages your subscriber list, and even shows statistics and reports of email campaigns and individual emails to measure success.

A few examples of leading ESPs are Constant Contact, Drip, ConvertKit, and AWeber.

CREATE YOUR CAMPAIGN

An email marketing platform will help you in the creation of your campaign. By selecting the desired template, choosing recipients, and other options that vary from platform to platform, you can start working with your creative strategy. When it comes to the copy of an email, there are a lot of things to be considered. Writing for social media, or any other medium for that matter is very much different vis-a-vis to that of writing an email.

Let’s talk about the header first.  The header mainly consists of 3 important elements which are sender name, subject line, and Preheader. The header is critical as it determines whether the recipients open the email or not.  Sender name and subject line are self-explanatory. On the other hand, pre header is basically used to provide a short summary of the email. It is typically one sentence long and is usually displayed after the subject line when the email is viewed in the inbox of the recipient. 

Then comes the body of your email. This contains the majority of the information and is generally the longest part of the email. You can add a lot of visual elements like GIFs and infographics to supplement the text. While writing the copy of the message, make sure it’s conversational. Avoid sounding way too much promotional and robotic. Remember to talk to your subscribers’ interests. Don’t talk at your subscribers, talk with them — speak their language, address their pain points, show them authenticity. Also, keep it short, clear, and direct. Further, make sure to add a suitable call to action that will help you guide your customers to the next steps. Keep your design consistent. Don’t switch templates mid-campaign. Some creative variations are okay, but your recipients should know what to expect.

When you are done with the major part i.e. the body, it is now time to add a suitable footer. Some important things to include in your footer are your social media links, unsubscribe links, and contact information. When you are done with designing your email, it is time to hit the send button!

ENABLE TRACKING

Tracking is one of the most important part of your email marketing strategy. Tracking refers to the obtaining and studying of the performance analytics that tells you about the performance of your campaign and where you can improve. There are so many online email marketing tracking tools available. Most of these tools let you track the number of unique recipients who have opened your email, study your Click-through rate, analyse the bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, and so on.

Above we have listed and have elaborated the essentials to create and run a successful email campaign for your business. Once you track and analyze your email marketing campaign reports, you can find out what works and what does not work for your audience and then you can make suitable iterations in your ongoing and upcoming email campaigns.

What more do you recommend to create and run an effective and successful email campaign for your business? Please suggest through comments.