How To Build A Successful E-Mail Marketing Campaign

Steps To Creating Successful E-Mail Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing has now surpassed direct mail in terms of volume, according to the Direct Mail Association. These numbers don’t surprise me one bit, for the simple fact of how much cheaper, targeted, measurable, sustainable, and scaleable e-mail is compared to direct mail. I have an awesome little infographic here on where the trend of email marketing is headed, which will help you get a grasp at the magnitude of what you currently have at your fingertips. **All sources are included at the bottom** Once you sift through the infographic, I will be providing you with a 9-step process that should help you carry out a campaign and ensure a successful return on your investment.

Hopefully the infographic provided you with some value, and gave you a birds eye view of where this form of marketing currently is, and more importantly where it is headed. Now, I would like to outline 9-steps to carrying out your own e-mail campaign. If you have not done so already, you will need to pick up an e-mail marketing platform. I suggest either Aweber, or GetResponse. *Note* (this is not a tutorial on how exactly to use either one of these programs, each of these companies have great training/support teams within, this is moreso a guideline to building out a successful campaign – not setup and/or integrations). Lets Begin

9 Steps To Creating Successful E-Mail Marketing Campaigns.

1. Plan Your Campaign.

Anything done well, takes planning and work behind the curtains. If you do not plan to succeed, you are planning for failure. When in the planning stages, there will be a few things to consider: (write these down on paper and when you are planning, follow this step by step) • Who is your target audience? Understand that one e-mail campaign is not “one size fits all.” You need to etch out your target audience, who are they? What are their needs? How can you specifically solve their problems? Not every person has the same problem, making this is a KEY concept. KNOW your target audience, get in their heads! Once you have outlined your target audience, you will be able to build out and design email creatives that will encourage them to engage and respond. • What are your objectives? Take a few minutes to identify the main aim of this campaign. Have intention in everything that you do. Do you want to generate sales, create brand awareness, collect information, all of the above?? Have a laser focused purpose for your campaign other than “to make me money.” • What is your budget? Once you have set yourself a budget, stick to it! Marketing costs can quickly escalate, and the way you combat that is to be strict within yourself at a set budget. Always test, and scale! Perform an Email ROI analysis – you can do that right here! • How are you going to implement and track your campaign? Both Aweber and GetResponse have tools integrated within them which will allow for tracking, but you must figure out a way to implement, and expand on those results from the data you receive from your tracking methods. The overall success of a campaign is in the bottom line, did you see a return on your investment? I have more information right here about tracking numbers etc…

2. Segment. Personalize. Be Relevant.

Use the information you have gathered about your who your target audience is, and send them personalized relevant content. Remember it is 80% about how targeted your marketing is, and 20% your ad copy/creative. The better your targeting, the higher the likelihood of a successful campaign.

3. Write Awesome Subject Lines.

Now, “awesome” could be subjective, but you will want to write a subject line that prompts e-mail open rates. Keep you subject simple, to the point, and add a little bit of flare mixed with some personality. Remember, this is the first thing your readership will see when they optin to one the campaigns you have created.

The last thing you want is to end up in the junk folder for a sub-par subject line.

4. Design Strong Campaign Creative.

Now we are on to the fun stuff, the actual e-mail. You will want to design a very strong wire frame template, and include these pointers when doing such: • Make both image and text clickable. • Include video links. • Your logo in the top left corner is a great spot for brand recognition. • Keep your messages short, and scrolling to a minimum. • Try sticking with only one or two fonts/colors. • Keep the e-mail scannable. Web readers will not read every word. • Steer away from using flash, anti-virus programs may mistake it for something malicious. • Include an unsubscribe link in the footer. • Give readers the option of both HTML and Text versions of the email. If you have ever read “The 4 Hour Work Week” before, you will know all too well about outsourcing: You can simply pay a third party company to do all the heavy lifting for you, in exchange for some coin. Or you could contact me directly, and I will point you in the right direction.

5. Direct Customers Through A Congruent Landing Page.

So now that your campaign is planned, you have segmented lists, and creative ad copy – you now need to start collecting these e-mails! You will wanting to be sending customers through a purpose built landing page designed to turn those clicks into leads, and those leads into sales. When designing your landing/squeeze page, please keep in mind these few pointers: • Make the Call To Action clickable • Make sure you copy is easy for the reader to scan/skim over. (you don’t want complicated paragraphs). • Only use content that is relevant in your emails, on the landing page. (Congruent messaging). • Make your call to action clear and prominent.

6. Test Before You Send.

The last thing you want to have happen is your pages not to properly be connected, you to not collect the e-mails, or for those emails to go into the wrong list… There are many working parts that can go awry. (I’ve made all the mistakes in the book, leverage my mistakes). The beautiful thing about making mistakes, is you learn to not make them again. Remember, you only will have one shot at this, one small mistake can turn a customer off of your product/service forever. You should send at-least 5 test e-mails to yourself, and your test email accounts before you send them off to your customers. Here is what you will want to be testing for: • That your images aren’t broken. • Set up test email accounts at all the major free providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook etc..), see what it will look like. • Your unsubscribe link works. • Make sure you have no words or phrases that will send them to a spam filter. Here is a free spam checker.

7. Measure Success.

The awesome thing about e-mail marketing, is that it is extremely easy to track results, tweak, and go again. If you are on a budget, this is such a great way to build leads, and create sales. Here are a few of the metrics you will want to be measuring: • The number of emails delivered. (delivery rate) • The number of emails opened. (open rate) • The number of ‘click throughs’ generated. (CTR= Click Through Rate) Ideally, you will want to be seeing these numbers increase. What you can test is subject lines/content/and promotional offers to see what will allow these numbers to rise. The more Emails you send —> the more people will open them —> the more who open —> the higher your CTR —> the greater the CTR —> the more sales you will have!  (hope that makes sense)

8. Keep Testing.

We are not perfect, and not every campaign will go as planned. That’s okay, there is no such thing as failure you can only learn and grow. It is very important to use your campaign results to modify and re-test. Maybe a stronger subject line, or improve ad copy on your landing pages? *hint* when you are testing/tweaking, only change one thing at a time – that way you will be able to clearly see what the affect the change had on your campaign. ex: Only change the ad copy of the landing page, if none of the metrics show any shifts, then you know it was not the ad copy giving you the results you received. If you were to change the ad copy, the subject line, and some images, and the metrics showed changes, you wouldn’t know where those changes came from… (hope that makes sense as well)

9. Integration.

This is taking it one step beyond, but integrating your email campaign with other communication channels such as direct mail marketing, TV, billboards, and print can highly increase your response rates. A study carried out by Royal Mail came back with a 25% increase in customer spend when going the multi-channel route.

9. Integration.

E-mail marketing is quickly becoming one of the cornerstone methods of communication between advertisers/marketers with their customer base. With the advances in mobile technology, we now have the ability to reach our customers in the palm of their hand at their convenience. It is important that we take full advantage of the opportunities placed before us, if you are looking to start your first campaign or a seasoned vet who needs some gentle reminders, this list of 9 Steps To Creating Successful E-Mail Marketing Campaigns will hopefully send you in the right direction! Take it and run with it…