Everything you Need to Know before Starting an Email Marketing Campaign

Sooner or later, all entrepreneurs turn to email marketing, regardless of the level and specifics of the business. Whether you have a small online store or a well-known brand, you conduct business from your apartment or have large offices in different countries – email marketing in any case will do a good job for your business.

Mailings were one of the first Internet marketing tools. And this is the case when “age” does not mean old-fashioned, but does imply reliability and time-tested. If you think that in the rapidly growing universe of digital marketing, the “oldies” have no place left, as practice shows, this statement is not as true as it seems to be. The first, on the one hand, contradictory, but on the other, simple and obvious evidence, is that every day our email boxes are replenished with dozens of letters. Some of them we open, some delete and quite a big amount just stays buried in unread lists. But ultimately, the ratio of availability, price and the result – increase in conversions, traffic, orders, customer loyalty – justifies the effort.

Of course, in order for the result of mass mailing campaigns to be exactly what you would like, and for good email campaign performance to be a matter of success rather than random luck, you need to correctly design your email strategy.

Our company provides the opportunity to carry out mass electronic mailings, and SendExpert customers often come up with questions about how to improve their mailings and increase the effectiveness of email campaigns. Of course, we try to select individual recommendations for each client, taking into account the specifics of his work and wishes. But in any case, there are some universal tips useful when working on an email strategy and composing email messages.

1. Define your goals

For your campaigns to be successful, they must have specific goals. It is very difficult to achieve a result if it is not indicated in the strategy. If you create a newsletter without specifying its purpose, the chances that it will be effective are reduced to the usual chance.

2. Explore the audience.

The main rule of marketers and content professionals is to always know with whom and for whom you work. To write effective text, you need to know as precisely as possible for whom you are creating content. The same principle works with email campaigns. If the newsletters “go nowhere”, then they do not satisfy recipients. It is necessary to collect the maximum amount of data on the preferences and needs of your target audience in order to provide them with only the necessary information and suggestions.

At this point, segmentation is worth mentioning. This option will make the content as suitable as possible for different groups of subscribers. Bulk email service SendExpert usually offer a fairly wide range of segment capabilities. In our service, you can segment the database using groups and filters, the number of which is unlimited. But it is worth remembering that all segments should be reasonably selected, since an excessive number of groups and filters can also be very inconvenient and even disastrous for your campaign.

3. Analyze competitors

If you want to improve your letters, you should look to what other representatives of your business sphere offer. So you can “spy” new ideas for your letters and campaigns, avoid repetition, and also find out what your target audience is missing and give them exactly the content that they lack.

4. The structure and scripts of letters.

If you undertook email marketing and mailing, then the best way to organize your work is to first create a “chain” of letters and write down approximate scenarios for each. This will help to see the big picture and see if your communication with the subscriber-client will be built in the right direction.

5. Test it!

If you do not like the results of campaigns, then your audience is not interested in your newsletters. How to fix it? No matter how trite it may sound – through trial and error. We cannot accurately predict the ideal recipes for email communication. The subject, preheader, the location of the text and images in the letter, the form and color of the button, the call to action and the key phrase of the letter can all have a decisive influence on the final report. But we can try different options and choose the one that will receive the greatest response from subscribers.

To determine the most optimal approach of sending letters, SendExpert specialists always recommend our customers use the A \ B testing function, that should be in every secure messaging platform. It allows you to test different options for one mailing on a limited, randomly selected part of the database. The option that gets the best performance is automatically sent to the majority. 

These top 5 tips will help you increase the effectiveness of email campaigns, improve your mailing list performance and generally optimize your email marketing and make it more productive.