Email marketing is a great way to build on your audience, increase conversions and forge strong customer relationships. But how can you achieve a successful marketing campaign if it’s something new to your business? 

Read ahead for our simple What, Why, Who, When, and How of email marketing. 

What is email marketing?

An email marketing campaign involves a series of emails that are sent to a target audience in order to achieve a specific goal. 

What kind of goal might this be? It can be anything your business needs, like increasing your customer base or building hype and desire for a new product offering. By sending a series of intentionally crafted emails for a specific audience, an email marketing campaign can strategically move customers along the sales funnel to (hopefully) increase conversion for your business. 

Why use email marketing?

Email marketing is a great economical option that consistently delivers impressive ROI. 

An email marketing campaign allows you to maintain relationships with your existing customers or develop new relationships with your potential customers. 

With the right practices in place, you can build trust with your audience and eventually bring them further down the sales funnel — all the way to conversion. 

Who should be the focus of your marketing campaign?

The content of your email marketing campaign should be laser-focused on the market segment that you’re trying to target. For example, if you’re hoping to target new leads, the aim of your emails should be to build awareness towards your product or service offering. Then, once a level of awareness has been achieved in that audience, you can work towards building a genuine interest for your offering and the benefits it can offer the customer. This can be achieved by highlighting how your product can solve the pain points being faced by the audience. 

Logically, the content of your marketing campaign should be personalised to cater to each of these audiences and their respective stages of the customer journey. 

Once your leads have developed a need for your product, they become a prospect as they move down the funnel and engage further with your marketing efforts. 

Then, the last step is for the lead to take action by making a purchase. This turns them into a customer; so from then on, your email marketing content to that customer should be catered towards retention. 

The AIDA Model 

All of these steps — which help illuminate who should be targeted at each step of the campaign — make up the AIDA Model. 

AIDA stands for Attract, Interest, Desire and Action. Each of these steps have their own goals and require content personalisation. In this model, the target audience will eventually be brought down the funnel until they click on your CTA and make a purchase. 

When should you be sending your emails?

Email cadence is entirely subjective (but also really important). 

The frequency of the emails being sent as part of a marketing campaign all depends on your audience segments, how engaged or disengaged each audience is, how quickly the trends of your industry are changing, how quickly your audience responds to your communications, and the type of engaging content you have generated, whether it’s a weekly newsletter or a monthly update. 

To decide the cadency of communications to each audience segment, it would be beneficial to add tags to each contact on your marketing automation platform based on their level of engagement, or even segment the audiences into lists. 

Understanding your customer lifecycle 

Email cadence should also be based on the customer lifecycle. 

As with the AIDA model, it takes a deep understanding of your audience’s intentions to get the right frequency of email sends. Customers who aren’t engaging with your offerings are not interested in receiving numerous emails a week — in fact, too many emails is likely to annoy and turn away customers who fall into this category. 

Once you get an understanding of your audience and their needs, the frequency of the emails will play a role in bringing your audience down the funnel; it’s important to align email cadence with each audience segment and your broader marketing goals at the same time. 

How should you strategise your marketing campaign?

Now that you’ve understood the 4 Ws of an email marketing campaign, it’s time to get to the final stage of our best practice guide. 

How do we go about strategising a successful marketing campaign? Here are our top 7 steps.

1. Personalisation is key 

By personalising things like your subject line and greeting, and including dynamic content, you can grab your audience’s attention quickly and build a sense of trust with them. 

First impressions are paramount, and with a personalised greeting from the first interaction you give yourself the best chance of making that impression a positive one. 

2. Test, test, test!

Over the course of an email marketing campaign, you’re able to run split tests with subject lines and headers to see what content works best for your audiences. 

You can optimise your content efforts and find how to increase open rates by A/B testing different components. This involves splitting your audience into groups and testing variations of each element in your content to see which performs better and resonates with each audience segment. 

Running these tests allows you to better understand your audience and optimise the content you deliver to them in future.

3. Humanise your content

In a digital landscape where customers might be receiving dozens of emails every day, it pays to incorporate a human element into your brand’s marketing communications. 

Humanising your content might looks like including your logo in the email footer, using a photo of blog authors with each article, or signing off emails with a personal signature from an employee. Elements like this help to build trust with your audience by showing the real person that’s behind your business’ communications. 

4. Know your regulations 

When you’re undertaking an email campaign which uses data from your audience, it’s of the utmost importance to practice GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliance and obey the CAN-SPAM Act. 

The GDPR protects the rights of individuals and their personal data, while the CAN-SPAM Act prohibits the sending of electronic communications without first obtaining consent from the recipient and being transparent with the ways in which the individuals’ data may be used. 

To align with each of these regulations and requirements, ensure you always give the option for your audience to opt in and out of your email campaigns. If you can, establish a double opt-in process, and always have an option to unsubscribe from emails. 

It’s also best practice to obtain consent from every subscriber before you use advertising cookies. 

5. Avoid spammy language

Are you finding that your email open rate is plummeting? 

There are certain spam trigger words that could be sending your emails straight to your recipients’ junk folders before they can even see it. 

Words like free, prize, giveaway, and bonanza are blacklisted by email software, so you need to make sure that your content is clear and concise without any language that might indicate click-bait. 

If you’re unsure of how to avoid these spam trigger words, you can use tools such as Emailable which check your email deliverability (and as a bonus, it’s GDPR compliant). 

6. Segment your campaigns 

You’ll set yourself on the path to a higher level of content personalisation if you segment your audience based on their interest level, the stage of the sales funnel they’re at, and their geographic location. 

Segmenting your email marketing audience in this way allows you to tailor your content according to the needs of each segment, which reduces disinterest and provides specified content that brings each prospect further down the funnel. 

7. Adaptable & compatible 

By ensuring your email content is dark-mode compatible, you increase your chances of resonating with your audience. 

Dark mode is becoming increasingly popular for its increased readability and reduced strain on users’ eyes, so it’s important to make sure that your emails can comfortably be read whether your audience is using light or dark mode on their devices. 

You must also check that your emails are viewable on a variety of devices, like mobile, tablet, or desktop computer — your campaign should be accessible regardless of where or how it is viewed. 

The keys to a great email marketing campaign

Now that you’ve grasped the concept of curating a successful email marketing campaign, you can really get started on your marketing journey. 

In order to assess which of your campaigns are successful, how to filter through the right metrics, and identifying KPIs, you can visit our blog on the best practices when measuring email performance.