The Five Essential Elements of an Email Marketing Campaign tech Corner

With the onset of messaging and social marketing, email has lost a bit of its luster, but it still boasts the highest ROI for any marketing channel, and is the best way to build an ‘owned’ audience that you can continue to market to in the future.

By Kevin Snow

Did you know the first marketing email was sent in 1978? That email resulted in $13 million in sales; and kicked off what has become one of the most highly used marketing channels even to this day. With the onset of messaging and social marketing, email has lost a bit of its luster, but it still boasts the highest ROI for any marketing channel, and is the best way to build an “owned” audience that you can continue to market to in the future.

Since that first email, email use has continued to grow with over 269 billion emails currently being sent each day. That is a lot of competition for your audience’s attention. And that number is going to keep growing too. So how do you make sure that your emails keep your audience’s interest and don’t end up in the junk folder?

So first off, you need to understand this one thing.

What is an email campaign?

An email campaign is an email or series of emails sent from a business to one or more customers or prospects (contacts) designed to get the recipients to take a specific action, engage with your business, and generate more leads and sales for your business. An email campaign is normally initiated (triggered) by a specific behavior or action by the contact.

Before launching a successful email campaign, there are a few elements that you need to consider.

1. What do you want the email campaign to accomplish?

Now I know it is really tempting when you get an idea to rush out and put it into action (I have a client like this), but you need to slow down. If you want your campaign to be successful, you’ve got to step back and think about what you’re trying to accomplish.

Typical objectives for an email campaign include:

Welcoming new subscribers and telling them about your business and values so you start to build a relationship with them.

Boosting engagement with your content and your business, whether that’s promoting a webinar or driving traffic to specific content.

Nurturing existing subscribers by providing something they’ll value.

Re-engaging subscribers who haven’t been particularly active.

Segmenting your subscribers so you can send more targeted email marketing campaigns.

Driving Sales to online products by highlighting best sellers, promoting new releases, or making product recommendations.

Helping B2B prospects navigate their buyers’ journey in a way that results in a sale for your sales team through the use of targeted content based on their current sales stage.

Understanding your goals will help you when you start writing the copy and designing the visuals for your emails.

2. What does the email campaign automation look like?

Based on your objectives for the campaign, you need to identify a few key aspects of the campaign itself:

What triggers the campaign to start for a contact? Is it an opt-in form submission? A specific page on your website being visited? A prospect hitting a specific sales stage? Or for e-commerce, an abandoned shopping cart?

What is the timing and frequency of the emails? The time of day users receive emails can directly contribute to performance indicators like open rate and click-through-rate. The best times in general to send emails is 8am and 4pm on weekdays. The frequency at which you disseminate your messages also plays a major role in performance. Contacts are increasingly subject to email fatigue if they are constantly inundated with emails from you. Try to stay at no more than two a week.

What Triggers the campaign to stop? There is nothing more annoying that getting an email asking you to do something that you already did. So, when planning your campaigns, you need to include conditions to stop sending people emails if specific activities are completed. IE., if they go back and purchase what was in their abandoned shopping cart.

3. Have great content:

Copy and Visuals Now that you have the objectives and the campaign design down you can start building your emails. When designing your email copy, it is important to remember there are two key items you need to pay attention to: the subject and the body.

While the subject contains the least amount of information, it is the most important part of the email. It is what recipients will use to decide whether they open your email or not. It should be short, personalized, and action oriented.

Getting your contacts to open your emails is only the first step though. The next step is getting them to click through and take the specific action you set as the goal for your campaign. Here are some tips to help make your copy effective:

Don’t talk at your subscribers, talk with them. Speak their language, address their specific concerns and desires, be your authentic self with them. Don’t fall into the trap that many emails do and focus on what you are trying to sell instead of having a conversation with your contacts.

Don’t go Leo Tolstoy on your emails. This isn’t War and Peace. Keep it short, clear, simple, and direct.

Include visuals. A picture is worth a thousand words. Put a banner image at the top, and smaller images sprinkled throughout depending on your campaign’s goals. The preferred ratio for text to image is 60% text to 40% image.

Personalize if possible. If you’ve collected first and last name, or other personal information, make use of this to add a personal touch to the email. Use personalized tags, write in a one-to-one conversation mode, and ask for their feedbacks. When using Merge tags for personalization, test before sending. You don’t want your subscribers to end up with ‘Hi First Name’ as email greeting. (Trust me, this comes from experience.)

Responsive design is an important consideration when designing your email. Make sure your email looks just as great for your mobile readers as it does for desktop users.

Include several calls-to-action. Don’t only put your CTA at the bottom of your email. Ensure your readers have several options to click through; phrase them differently so you don’t sound pushy or robotic.

4. Are you prepared to review your results? Your work isn’t over when you hit send. You need to be able to track some key statistics about your email campaigns. In the beginning you will want to track the following key performance indicators:

Deliverability measures the rate at which emails reach your intended subscribers’ inboxes.

Open rate is the percentage of people that open your email once it reaches their inbox.

Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the percentage of people that click on your CTAs.

Unsubscribes measures the number of people who opt out of your email list once they receive an email from you

Spam Complaint Rate is the percentage of recipients that report your email as spam.

As you start collecting data you will want to start using A/B Split testing to test alternative subject lines or calls to action to see if you can increase your open and click through rates. Be sure to only test one variable at a time so you can be sure of the impact your changes are having. Most email service providers will have A/B testing built into their software, which will make it easy for you to compare email results without much manual work.

Once you’ve finished your first campaign, you’ll find that it gets easier and easier to go from just an idea to a completed campaign. You’ll start to know what works and what doesn’t. But the most important thing to remember is this: Treat your subscribers like humans.

You can build a highly engaged audience if you keep this golden rule top-of-mind in every email you send. Your subscribers want to hear from you, and they want to relate to you, or they never would have opted into your list. Be a resource for them and they will look forward to opening emails from you just like they would from any of their friends.

Kevin Snow is the founder of Time On Target, a digital marketing agency that helps businesses effectively use technology to grow their business. Kevin has helped companies all across the United States shorten their sales cycle and increase their closing rates by utilizing sales automation to increase the time sales teams are in front of prospects selling. You can reach Kevin at kevin.snow@time-on-target.com.