Build Your Best Email Marketing Campaign… Ever

In 2016, it can seem as if every company is focused solely on social and search advertising. Marketing tactics of the past appear to have fallen out of favor and out of use – in particular, the use of email. Countless different industry blogs utter the same refrain year after year – “email marketing is dead”. Despite the ominous rumination of naysayers, email marketing remains as one of the most consistently reliable forms of reaching your customers and prospects.

Overall Email Marketing Campaign Strategy

As with any other kind of ad campaign, an email campaign requires a certain amount of planning and preparation in order to be effective. The most effective email campaigns are constructed using a handful of strategic decisions. These include:

• Determining the purpose of the campaign, whether it’s sales, lead generation, or just general outreach
• Length of the campaign – a week? A month? Several times a year?
• Overall message – are you trying to get people to buy something right away, or are you trying to build anticipation?
• Creative theme – will each email look different, or will there be a consistent color scheme and design?
• Interval of messaging – will you send just one email, or a series? How frequently will the emails be sent?

It’s also important to consider what audience segments will receive your email. While it’s understandably tempting to send your campaign out to your entire email list, you may find it’s far more effective to send particular emails to particular groups within your broader audience. Past purchasers may be more likely to open your email. A particular group of your customers may have a special need for the product you’re pushing, or you could focus on sending a special deal to members of your company’s customer loyalty program.

Although your homegrown email list can be an excellent source of sales, it’s also worth considering an email list rental. For a nominal fee, many agencies will let you send an email to an audience they’ve built. This can be fairly effective if your product appeals to a specific niche interest, such as camping, sports, fashion, or certain political affinities. However, it’s essential to carefully vet an email list before you rent it; it’s a sadly common trend for rented lists to have been constructed using unscrupulous data collection methods.

Designing Your Email

There are many different approaches to designing emails for use in a marketing campaign. The exact format of your email will depend on your company’s branding, as well as the overall goal of the campaign. That being said, it’s essential to design your emails to be easy to read and fully mobile-responsive. If your campaign is sales-oriented, you should also be sure to include a clear call to action so that your recipients know where to click to make the purchase.

It also goes without saying that it’s essential to test your emails before you send them to your list. You’ll want to make sure that your email doesn’t get caught in a spam filter, as well as ensuring that the design of the email is rendered properly in different email clients.

Things to Keep in Mind

One of the biggest strengths of email marketing lies in tracking clicks and opens. Most major email marketing services (including Constant Contact and MailChimp) offer the ability to track who opens your emails and what links they click on. Many organizations also using Google UTM tags in order to instantly send inbound traffic information to their Analytics account.

Get in Touch

Email marketing can do wonders for a company’s inbound marketing.  If you have questions about your email marketing campaign, or if you’re looking to bolster your marketing efforts in general, contact us. Envision is a team of marketers, copywriters, designers, and developers. We’re here to help.