Creating Successful Email Campaigns
Marketing email campaigns are emails that are sent by businesses to customers or prospective customers in order to engage with them, drum up interest or directly generate sales. But before you start sending emails out you will need to do some groundwork in order to make a success of them.
Find a suitable email marketing platform
Obviously, to start creating successful email campaigns you’ll need a platform that allows you to create your campaigns to send out to your customers. Look for platforms that:
– Allow you to create campaigns easily and suits your skill level
– Can be integrated with software that you already use for your website (this will allow you to use your customers’ detail as well as things such as purchase history and other useful data)
– Allows you to segment your audiences
– Allows you to carry out an in-depth analysis of campaign performance.
– Suits your budget needs – after all, you don’t want to be spending a fortune on software if you still only have a small customer list.
For a list of some popular email marketing platforms check out here.
Build a customer list
Start by building your email list of customers that might be interested in receiving your emails. The best way to do this is to try and convert your website visitors or existing customers into subscribers. You can do this by having an area of your website dedicated for customers to sign up to receive your emails or you could also try using exit pop-ups to target customers that are about to leave your website. Make sure to entice customers to sing up for your emails and let them know what’s in it for them, for example, will you be letting them know when you have a sale on? When you have new products? The benefits of this compared to back in the day when people would buy email lists and send them off to everyone (this also isn’t legal anymore anyway) is that the people you are emailing have actually shown an interest in receiving your emails, increasing the chances of you achieving higher conversions.
Find out who your audience is if you aren’t already completely clear and gather data on things like their age, gender, location, business type (if applicable). This will help you to tailor your emails later on, making a more personable user experience.
Plan your email campaigns and establish your goals
Plan which emails you want to send and the promotions they will include. Let your customers know about any sales you have in place, offer voucher codes, freebies, or offer additional gifts and add ons to your orders (to name a few). One of our favourite promotions here at Davpack and one which our customers love is free sweets when they order with us. Try to mix it up and space the different emails out but don’t be afraid to offer the same things twice as well, as a lot of the time customers look forward to receiving certain offers again in the future. Make sure you are clear on the objective of each email you are sending out so that you can measure your expectations and success. Are you directly trying to gain sales? Or are you just trying to keep customers up to date new developments at your company and trying to increase engagement?
Create a schedule for when you will send your emails out so you are prepared and can send them consistently to keep your customers interested. This will also allow you to create them in advance, making it easier for you to manage.
Create your content
Start creating the content and your layout that you want to include in your emails, including products to promote, banners, text and links. Make sure that you’ve made an enticing subject line that stands out in a busy inbox and lets the customers know what the email is about in order to get them to open it, as inboxes can get busy and brushing off promotional emails can be easy if it doesn’t immediately stand out. Make sure to try and avoid using spam trigger words so that your emails don’t end up in your customers’ junk folder.
Don’t underestimate the power of design, as this is important for any successful email campaign. After all, how your email looks will directly reflect on you and emails that look bad will make recipients lose interest quickly.
With more and more people using the mobile phones for the internet and emails it’s important to make sure that your emails are optimised for mobile as well, otherwise, you could be missing out on a big chunk of your customers.
- Address your customer by name as personalised emails perform better (you can also personalise emails further by offering products based on their demographic or recent purchase history)
- Don’toverdo the text on emails aiming to gain sales
- Make a clear call to action and distribute it throughout the email
- Use accurate and attractive images of your products
- Add links to your website to make it easy for your customers to navigate through to your website, increasing traffic
Review and improve
Reviewing your emails is the most important step in achieving long term success with your email marketing. Just because you had some unsuccessful emails doesn’t mean they’re all doomed to fail in the future. Many email marketing platforms allow you to review and analyse their performance including where customers have clicked and engaged. Find what’s worked well and what hasn’t and try new things in terms of content as well as types of promotions and offers.
Once you’ve started getting some orders from your emails check out how you can use your packaging to improve the experience for your customers and check us out if you need any help with your packaging!
Sarah Hickson
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