Not fully appreciating the full extent of your email marketing campaign requirements earlier on can make it challenging to achieve success. From selecting the right infrastructure to ensuring a healthy mailing list, every detail is vital in building a successful email campaign.
From this article, you’ll find out:
- Why you should consider launching an email marketing campaign, along with some of the industry’s best practices for email marketing.
- Some critical metrics that can help you determine the success or failure of your email marketing campaign.
- Different areas of an email that you can split test along with some of the best email marketing tools in the industry.
Why Consider an Email Marketing Campaign?
Email marketing may seem like an old tactic, but it remains one of the most effective channels up to date. It remains one of the most useful marketing tactics, given its ability to drive conversions and build brand loyalty. It’s the single most powerful channel that you can use to reach your audience and achieve several different objectives as well. Furthermore, a majority of people online still use email regularly, which makes it a perfect tool for building customer relationships and generating leads and sales. Besides, email marketing is relatively easy to get started with, and thus, there’s no reason not to take advantage of it.
Best Practices for Email Marketing
A thoughtful email marketing campaign can help your brand. However, to effectively improve your email marketing campaign, you need to consider the industry’s best email practices and how you can add them to your marketing strategy. Below we take a look at best practices for improving your email marketing campaign:
- Do not Spam. Spam emails are largely associated with a high unsubscribe and spam rates. If these two continue, then you risk getting banned from your email marketing provider for good.
- Optimize for Mobile. A large number of people increasingly rely on mobile devices over desktop computers. Therefore, it’s no surprise that over half of emails are now read on mobile devices. That means you need to keep your email easy to load, read, view, and display nicely on most phones.
- Segment your list. You need to ensure that you’re sending only relevant content to your list. A great way to do this is through segmentation. Segmented emails help you create personalized and relevant email campaigns that are based on various segments.
- Frequency and Timing. The frequency and timing of your emails may determine the success or failure of your email marketing campaign. While there is no perfect formula for frequency and timing, running some tests and improving your baseline is a great way to start.
- Email Delivery Infrastructure. Nowadays, email accounts automatically filter junk mail. However, if you adhere to basic technical email delivery rules, you shouldn’t have any problems reaching your target audience. You only need to follow the fundamentals of SPF and DKIM authorization, DMARC policy guidelines, IP warm-up protocols, and monitoring blacklists.
Things to Split Test in your Emails
The best way to test your email marketing strategies, especially if you’re not 100% satisfied with your results, is through split testing. It’s an integral part of the email marketing strategy. With it, you can know when your email campaigns are working or not based on actual responses to them. Based on insight gained while testing, you can create more effective email campaigns and minimize the risk of running a poor campaign. Moreover, all your decisions will be based on actual tested data and insight rather than guesswork or gut-instinct. Therefore, there’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t test your emails (unless you already know you’ve got a great layout already; But testing can always confirm this or let you know that it needs improvements).
Below are a few examples of things you can test:
- Email Subject Lines.
- Email Copy Length and Format
- Time and Day the Email is Sent
- Images and GIFs
- Call to Action (CTA)
How to Measure a Successful Email Marketing Campaign
Fortunately, email marketing is easy to track and measure. There are a plethora of performance metrics available to gauge the efficiency of your email campaigns. You only need to find the ones that best suit your email marketing goals and monitor them. Going a step further and producing periodic reports will help you see how well the campaign is performing over time. Below are some of the most important email marketing metrics that can help you measure the success of your email marketing campaign.
- Open Rate
- Click-Through Rate
- Conversion Rate
- Deliverability / Delivery Rate
- Bounce Rate
- Unsubscribe Rate
- Revenue / ROI (Return On Investment)
Email Marketing Tools
Choosing the best email marketing tools has a significant impact on the success of your email marketing campaign. There are dozens of email marketing tools in the market right now, so it’s easy to get overwhelmed. However, each tool has its own set of unique features. Therefore, it’s crucial that you use tools that only fit your business marketing needs. For instance, if you want to inspect the reputation of your email IP or domain, Talos is a good tool to use. For email automation, you may want to check out Woodpecker. Other tools that you may want to leverage include:
- MailTester
- QuickEmailVerification
- Hubspot
- SparkPage
- PostMaster Tools
- Zero Bounce,
- Hemingway Editor
- Litmus
- Send Check It
- Anymail Finder, among others.
More information on which areas the tools help can be found within the infographic.
Conclusion
All successful marketing campaigns begin with setting goals, and email marketing is no different. Nevertheless, just like all other marketing channels, email marketing has its fair share of obstacles to overcome. Therefore, it’s always important to start strong, especially before launching an email marketing campaign. Tackle all these issues before-hand, and you’ll have a better chance at having a robust email marketing campaign that will delight all your customers.
My name is Paweł Tomczyk. I’m a technology enthusiast and an early adopter. I’m the contributor in the blockchain ecosystem and various range of funds. I help people create content such as articles, infographics, and social media posts, as well as help them with creating digital communities, launching crowdfunding projects, and more.
Email Campaign stock photo by Who is Danny/Shutterstock
