When it comes to creating an effective email marketing campaign, it’s important to remember that before you even start writing your first message, you’ll want to have a strategy and a goal in place. That can cause many people to freeze up and feel overwhelmed by “analysis paralysis” as they try to perfect every step and end up getting stuck in the details of the email and missing the big picture of the overall campaign.
Fortunately, by asking yourself the following questions as you create each message, you can create an effective email marketing campaign that gets results and helps you get conversions.
What is the End Goal?
Now, before you say “more sales!” take a step back and think about how you want to reach that goal. Distill your goals down into smaller individual “sub-goals” such as “increase sales by x%. This will allow you to think about the steps involved to reach that goal and it also gives you a more concrete result to aim for.
Again, it’s easy to break down your email marketing goals into smaller tidbits to the point where you get overwhelmed. Just remember: small, concrete and manageable gets you to the end goal.
Who are You?
One of the little-known “campaign killers” is simply subscribers not really knowing who you are, or more importantly, why they should care. Companies make this problem worse by sending their emails from “Company Name” rather than a person’s name, and an email address of “no-reply@example.com”.
Although it’s understandable that you don’t want to add to your support workload, this kind of approach inherently tells the subscriber “you’re not important to us”. It also prevents you from building up a meaningful business relationship with them and them with you.
A more relationship-friendly approach is to incorporate an email-to-support-ticket system to allow your support team to be proactive about answering questions and directing users to the answers they need while still maintaining a professional, polished and approachable front.
Switch Up Your Subject Line Process
Do you typically write your subject line first before your email? Or is it the last thing you do before you prepare the email to be sent? Either way, switch up the process and freshen up the process. Your subject line has to be compelling but short.
Remember that your users may be reading your email on their phones, their computer or their tablet, and it’s possible that the subject line gets cut off. Think of ways that you can add urgency or pique curiosity quickly with short-but-sweet terms or even emojis if it’s relevant to your business.
Leverage Personalization to the Fullest
Oftentimes, many email marketers will start to create an effective email marketing campaign just using basic personalization such as the subscriber’s first name. Many of the best email marketing services offer much deeper personalization features than that.
For example, GetResponse lets you use geo-targeted fields as well as assign your own fields for whatever you want. So if you’re selling rain boots in Seattle, you might have a custom field for the user’s shoe size and the colors they prefer. This would let you create an email message full of personalized features like:
Hey Jane! The weather’s getting brisk in Seattle these days. Look chic in any season with gorgeous new rain boots that are cute and comfortable! We’ve got them in size 7 and in red just for you!
How much more likely would you be to click an email message that was personalized like that as opposed to a more generic ‘Boot Sale Going On Now”.
Do You Have a Call to Action?
Oftentimes when creating compelling email marketing campaigns, we tend to forget to ask for the sale! We pour so much of our time and focus into getting the design just right, and making sure the subject line and personalization are perfect that adding a call-to-action slips our mind.
So consider this your reminder. Include a call-to-action in your emails — preferably a link as those who have images turned off might not see that fancy button you added. Your call-to-action should have an action word in it — like Browse our Selection, View the Latest Styles or even Check Out the Hottest Deals. The goal is to get users excited and enticed enough by the content of your message to click.
Have You Planned the Rest of the Campaign?
This is where most well-thought-out email campaigns end — but it doesn’t have to be! Based on whether or not the user clicked the link in your message, you can then follow up and segment your messages accordingly based on who viewed those pages, what products they looked at, and so on.
Keep in mind that much of this customizability and segmentation will depend on how deeply personalized your messages can be based on your email marketing service provider. If you want to go deep into personalized, segmented emails, we recommend GetResponse as they have the most thorough customization options through a simple “click-to-add” style of interface.
