The world has approximately 7.8 billion people, and 4 billion of them used email in 2020 according to this Statista report. All organizations use email for internal communication between employees, communicating with vendors and partners, to acquire new customers, retain existing customers, promoting their products or services and a million other things.
Lead generation is one of the key goals of paid email marketing campaigns, and we will cover that aspect in detail, in this detailed guide to running perfect email marketing campaigns.
Though you could use your Outlook or Webmail to send emails to your customers, there is very little data available to you about the performance of these emails. There are some very smart email marketing tools available in the market, that give you basic functionalities like email templates, WYSIWYG email creators, unsubscribe option, basic statistics like opens, clicks, bounce, unsubscribe and more.
Marketing automation tools use artificial intelligence and automated workflows to ensure that you send the right email at the right time, to the right audience. Here are some interesting tools that you should definitely consider for running your email marketing campaigns:
These campaigns include introductory or promotional emails sent to prospective customers to entice them to visit your website, and also to purchase your products or services.
Remember that these email lists would have to be purchased or generated by you, through online tools.
Monthly newsletters are targeted at both existing customers and prospects to keep them updated about your organization, what’s new and what’s changing.
Newsletters require a good subscriber base to make it worth the effort. So, ensure that your newsletters are informative as well as interesting.
These email campaigns are targeted at those customers who are already working with you, or those who have worked with you in the past. It helps in branding and also to give regular updates to your customers, so that your name stays fresh in their minds.
A key point here is not to overdo this, to the point that your customers get frustrated with too many emails.
Promotional emails are sent when you have a new product launch or a new offer that you would like to send to your prospects. These are not regular, but one-off emails sent only during the promotion period.
These limited period offers might also include coupon codes, or discount vouchers for special customers.
Sending an email blast to your complete email list, without a second thought can cause more harm than good. Here are some things to keep in mind before launching a successful email marketing campaign.
In addition to pricing, there are a few important factors that you should consider before choosing an email marketing platform. It’s crucial to establish a seamless connection between your CRM and email marketing tool, to ensure that you can reach customers who already inquired with you.
Easy-to-use templates, customer segmentation, easy opt-out, integrations with other marketing software, A/B testing are features present in most popular tools, that can make your email marketing campaign more effective.
This is THE MOST CRUCIAL step in any email marketing campaign. The effectiveness of your campaign depends on the quality of your contact list. Purchasing email lists is an easy option, but not the most effective, since sellers tend of bulk up email lists with non-targeted audience.
The most effective method is to send emails to those who have already gotten in touch with you over the past. But not everybody has an extensive email list.
Work with tools like Zoominfo, Lusha, LinkedIn Sales Navigator to create a list of email ids of your target audience. Plain old data mining also helps. Remember this is tedious work, but it can yield results if done right. So, spend some time, money, and effort on procuring the right email ids for your campaign.
Do not treat your entire audience list the same. Do not send an email blast to all the email ids you have.
Segment your list based on geography, source from which you procured the list, demographics, and customer interests, so that you can customize your email to that particular segment.
Schedule of email delivery should also be controlled based on geography of the customer.
We all remember with dread, the olden-days newsletters that were very long and boring. Too many images, too many links, and very little thought into how they would read.
But email marketers have become smarter these days, making the copy short, sweet, and captivating.
Regardless of how good your email is and how well it’s targeted, if your customers get it very frequently, they are likely to get bugged. There are studies on ideal email frequency, that give different answers.
But most studies agree that 2-3 emails in a month is what will keep your brand fresh in the minds of your target audience. Testing helps to arrive at how your open rate and click through rate(CTR) varies with the frequency of emails.
Different target audience have different ‘ideal time for opening emails’. Send them too early, and your emails would be drowned in the deluge of early morning emails. Send them too late, and your customer is already winding up for the day. Send them while they are busy at work, and the email gets ignored.
The ideal time of email delivery should be tested over multiple campaigns before you arrive at one or two good time windows. Choose the right days and the right time, to maximize chances of your email opened, read an acted upon.
The links in your email and where you lead the visitors is as important as the other aspects of your campaign. Add 2-3 important links in your email copy, and lead them to appropriate landing pages.
These landing pages should contain all relevant information, to help your customer take the desired action. Add prominent CTAs so that your visitors don’t stray from your conversion funnel.
No campaign is perfect, not when it starts, not when it’s mature. But work towards perfection with each new campaign, checking data and changing your strategy based on data. Here are some key numbers you should have your eyes on:
Most email marketing platforms provide the option to run A/B tests to check which of your campaigns work best. Test out subject lines, email copies, number of links, designs and images to ensure that your email campaign is near-perfect.
With the right kind of tools and tagging, you can get data on a number of valuable parameters to assess the performance of your email marketing campaign. Keep a close eye on the numbers, and do some in-depth data analysis to create a solid framework for your email marketing campaign.
All links placed in email campaigns should be tagged using UTM parameters, UTM ID or campaign ID to track valuable information about your visitors.
URLs like
https://www.camptag.ai/product.html?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=leadgen&utm_content=logo
or
https://www.campaign.ai/product.html?cid=785566
give you detailed, granular information about your email campaign.
If you would like help with tagging your email marketing campaign links, reach out to CampTag. Add unlimited custom dimensions to your campaign URLs, generating bulk URLs in a few easy steps.