Campaign Creation
CBefore you even think about creating your email campaign, you need to understand why you’re creating one in the first place.
What do you hope to achieve with this email? What action do you want your contacts to take after they open your email?
Here are some goals you can set for your email campaigns:
- Brand awareness
- Website traffic
- Revenue generation
- Lead nurturing
- Feedback and surveys
Understanding the goal of your campaign gives your efforts direction and helps you achieve tangible results. Make sure your email campaign goals are aligned with the larger goals of your business and have a positive impact on your bottom line.
Target Audience
No matter what industry you’re operating in, your business likely has several types of customers, each with its own, unique characteristics and needs.
For better conversions, you should segment your subscribers for each campaign. You can segment subscribers based on a variety of factors — from age, gender, and location to interests, preferences, engagement levels, and online activity.
Test Email Campaigns & get strong results
Online email marketing offers various ways to test and see if you’re hitting the nail on the head with your marketing efforts. You can perform A/B and multivariate testing to examine almost every component of your email campaign, from the subject line and time sent to the content within the email campaign itself. This offers valuable insights as to where you might need to revise your email marketing strategy to drive the most engagement with your email campaigns.
Campaign Choosing
There are several types of emails that brands send out to achieve specific goals. The type you choose will depend on your goal and target audience.
Here are some popular email campaign types every marketer should know:
Welcome email series
A welcome email series — or even a single welcome email — is the first email a subscriber receives when they sign up to your email list or make a purchase.
With an average open rate of 50%, welcome emails are a great way to introduce new contacts to your brand, products, and services.
The best welcome emails are short and actionable. Their main focus is to take subscribers to the “next step.”
Time to send the email out
Timing is crucial when it comes to effective email marketing.
If you send out an email campaign at 3 am when most of your subscribers are sleeping, your email will likely get buried under the huge pile of other emails that will land in your subscribers’ inboxes when they wake up the next morning.
To get maximum engagement out of your emails, you need to send them out at the right time — including the hour and day of the week.
Let’s look at some data on the best times and days to schedule your emails:
The best days to send emails are Tuesday, Thursday, and Wednesday.
The best times to send an email are 10 am, 2 pm, and 8 pm.
Keep in mind that the right time could vary depending on your target audience, so make sure you take their location and time zone into account before scheduling your emails.
Performance Tracking
One of the best things about email marketing is that you can continuously track and improve the performance of your email campaigns.
Most email marketing tools offer in-depth analytics and dashboards to help you understand whether your emails are having the desired effect or not.
Below are some key metrics you should be tracking for all your email campaigns:
Open rate: This shows you the average number of opens your emails get. Open rates can help you analyze the effectiveness of your email subject lines, sender name, and pre-header text (the snippet viewable right after the subject line in many email clients).
Click-through rate: This shows you the average number of times subscribers clicked on the links or CTAs inside your emails. The click-through rate is an important metric for understanding email engagement.
Bounce rate: This shows you the percentage of your contacts who didn’t receive your email. A high bounce rate can indicate that your email list is full of inactive, fake or outdated contacts, or that you need to change your email service provider.
Unsubscribes: This shows you the number of people who unsubscribed from your email list. High unsubscribes could either indicate that your email content is not relevant to your subscribers, or that your emails aren’t being sent to the right audience.
Spam complaints: This shows you the number of times your emails have been marked as spam. This could be due to spammy subject lines, irrelevant email content, unsolicited emails, or issues with your email marketing software.
Other email metrics include conversion rates, most visited pages, best-performing links, mobile open rates, revenue per email, and more. In fact, there are dozens of metrics you can track depending on the email marketing software you’re using.
Align your metrics with your email marketing goals to hone in on the most important ones that illustrate what’s working and what’s not, and avoid analysis paralysis.