What is an Email Marketing Campaign?
Email marketing campaign is a set of planned and coordinated individual email messages distributed with the motive of accomplishing a specific goal for any organization. The number of active email users is forecasted to reach 4.3 billion within 2-3 years and the expected ROI is $42 for each dollar spent which makes email the best source connecting with existing customers and the prospects. The different purposes that an email marketing campaign can serve:
- Traffic generation – Email marketing campaigns can be used to drive remarkable results for optimising your rank on search engines. SEO and email marketing generally don’t work together but if you think out of the box, you can see where they complement each other, and how successful email marketing can also benefit your search traffic.
- Build Brand Awareness – It is one of the most cost-effective ways to build brand awareness. When used correctly, it allows you to reach your customers directly and build a long-term relationship. An email marketer should focus on providing genuine value.
- Lead nurturing – Nurturing of leads through email marketing allows your brand to stay in frequent communication with prospects. This keeps you and your products top of mind so when the prospect is ready to buy, they’ll go straight to you instead of your competitors. Companies that focus on lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost.
- Sales and Revenue – Upselling and cross-selling for existing customers can be carried out through email marketing campaigns. Sales conversion can also be captured by targeting users who are close to making a purchase decision. For example – products added to cart but no checkout.
Steps to Be Taken For Creating an Effective Email Campaign
- Build and verify targeted email lists – Successful campaigns begin with verified email lists full of qualified leads interested in your offer. There are many subtle ways to attract users and build an email list the most popular of which is to convert your website visitors into subscribers. Carry out a regular verification of such lists with an accurate email verifier to remove the invalid and inactive users as sending emails to them can increase the bounce rate and damage sender’s reputation.
- Know your goal – Do not send out the campaigns just for the sake of it. Be clear in your intentions about what you want from the campaigns as that will help you target the correct audience. For example, if you want to convert Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) into Sales Qualified Leads (SQL), a part of MQL can be segmented and an educational/informative email marketing campaign can be used to bring them closer to a buying decision.
- Use the right tools for maintaining data quality – There are multiple email marketing tools available and the best can be chosen by keeping the following features in mind:
- Ease in campaign creation, automation, templates available and workflows
- Integrations with other tools/software in use
- Ways to record the future audience and segment the existing ones
- In-depth key metrics to understand the campaign performance
- Create the drip – Once the goal, email type and audience, it’s time to plan the email marketing campaign. The plan includes the frequency , the type, a rough idea of the content to be included and the CTA to be included if any.
- Craft and test the subject lines – Subject line is the face of your message and plays an important role in getting people open and reading your email. An email subject line should be short and clear to get the attention of the people.
Source : MarketingCharts
- Write and proof-read the content – Personalised emails have proven to be more successful. In addition keep the marketing copy short, to-the-point and avoid pitching the offer too early. Instead, try to build a bond with the reader to add a comfort level.
- Focus on the design – 74% of the users check their emails on mobile so your email should be designed in a way that resizes based on the device used to open it. Though images make an email more attractive, emails with more text than images are considered better.
- Test and track – Sending an email is the first step, a regular analysis is necessary to improve future campaigns. The analysis includes – the design, layout, content of the email, subject lines, deliverability rate, opens, clicks, unsubscriptions etc.
Examples of Successful Email Marketing Campaigns
1. Welcome Email – Clearout
Clearout email verifier uses a simple yet effective version of welcome email that provides all the information a user requires on registering to a new platform. Simple language, a single CTA, brief of benefits and a video tutorial, all information served in a single platter making further engagement easier for the user.
2. Emails with User-Generated Content (UGC) to increase engagement- Finis
Instead of using traditional creatives, organizations now prefer including user-generated content in the emails to drive engagement. UGC strategy works the best for ecommerce sellers as the prospects find such data trustworthy, more influential and urges them to participate.
3. Personalized Emails – Netflix
Netflix uses data driven personalized email marketing campaigns to reach out to the users and has been applauded by Forbes for its marketing strategies. Netflix uses personalized emails to re-engage with the users who have been idle by triggering emails with personalized recommendations that match their cinematic taste that encourage re-engagement.
4. Sharing stories – Rob from Email Marketing Heroes
If told correctly emails with a short story or a mere experience can work wonders in driving engagement and I am saying this based on my own experience. A prospect shows interest in reading the emails, never ignores any message from you even if no further engagement is needed. Rob sends email on a daily basis and has an interesting story told in a supreme personalized manner.
5. Content emails – Canva
No extra talk, just sharing the latest content giving a one-liner on what it is related to. It’s to the point and users find such to-the-point emails very comforting. Here Canva has introduced the latest blog with a link.
6. Webinar Emails – Billy Gene
Using funny video or gif in such emails works pretty well as they give a gist of what the webinar host will be like. In this template within the first three lines the sender is able to capture your attention, mention the date and provide two CTAs.
7. Imageless but effective – Freelance Blogger
This email is compelling as it lures subscribers into reading case study, leverages the power of social proof twice and uses the ‘hard-to-resist’ trigger of ‘free’.
8. Reactivating sleeping users – Pinkberry
Giving a free product as incentive works in reactivating the sleeping users and the same technique was used by Pinkberry. Such emails not only refresh the memories of the product but make them go and check their accounts and reuse them as free products are hard to resist.
9. Survey campaigns to know your client better – Artifact
Artifact Uprising used a paid survey strategy to know their clients better. They offered $10 in exchange of a survey and the template design is also propulsive – a hand holding a phone waiting for someone on the line.
Inspired by any of the templates above? Having better ideas to share. You are more than welcome to share your ideas and creations.
Bharti Jain is immersed in creating, developing and coordinating all manner of content marketing at Clearout & ClearoutPhone. These are Saas products used for email verification and phone validation respectively. Bharti is the author of more than 50 articles and Ebooks and develops vlogs too. You can reach out and connect with Bharti on LinkedIn.
