Everyone wants to run a successful email marketing campaign. The question is how do you design it? What are the points that should be kept in mind to derive full mileage from your campaign?
Here are eight tips to create a successful email marketing campaign:
# 1. Write a catchy subject line:
Your first challenge is to get your customer to open the email. This is where the email subject line can either turn off your customer or prod him to open the email.
The best subject lines are the ones that
- Offer value: They do this by promising an upcoming discount, a gift coupon or a bundling of gifts.
- Create a sense of urgency or curiosity: They stampede customers into hurrying because the offer ends in the next 24 hours or even less.
- Are short and clear: It is important to keep the subject lines short; they must be in active voice and should be free of jargon or flowery language.
- Personalisation: They include the customer’s name and are based on customer preferences, requirements etc. The marketers need to understand their customers better to craft such subject lines
- Relevance and Timeliness: Such subject lines are tailored around festivals, national days etc. They tie up an offer to an upcoming holiday or festive season such as summer vacations, Christmas or Diwali.
- Related product emails: These subject lines offer product recommendations based on past purchases.
# 2. Design a visually pleasing email:
Like any other marketing creative, emailers too should be beautifully designed. The fonts should be carefully selected and attention should be paid to the font size, line spacing and white space.
Images, company logo and company colours should be included to reinforce the message and build brand awareness. However, large images should be avoided as they may load slowly and ruin the customer experience.
The emails must use responsive design. They should look pleasing on desktops, tablets or mobile phones.
#3. Use conversational language:
It is important to treat your customers as people and not as part of a marketing end game. Emails therefore must be personal and relatable. Use second person (you, your) to build a conversational tone. Avoid third person (them, their) as it makes writing terse and formal.
#4. Nurture your subscribers:
Without spamming your customers, emails should be used to follow up with subscribers to improve conversions.
The strategy is especially useful when it comes to persuade customers to complete their purchase. The first email can be a simple reminder telling customers that they have left some items in their cart. This can be followed up with a second email offering a discount coupon. If this too does not work, then a sense of urgency can be created. The customer can be informed that their cart will expire soon.
The danger of follow up mails is that the customer can get annoyed and block them, and the entire email marketing strategy may backfire.
#5. Create familiarisation:
Customers develop a sense of affinity when they get emails from one sender. They develop a rapport and are more likely to open mails that come from a sender in whom they have built trust.
Avoid the no-reply emails. They put off customers.
#6. Do A/B testing:
A/B testing is a smart way of testing the effectiveness of your email marketing. You can create two sets of emails on the same subject; and send them to a small percentage of your customers. One set gets one email while the other set gets the second email.
The results will help you decide which email did better. The email that does better can be sent to your remaining customers.
# 7. Be ethical and customer friendly:
You should never buy email lists. This can not only antagonise your customers but you can also end up getting blacklisted by email service providers.
Make sure that your emails go only to those customers who have opted voluntarily. Don’t make the mistake of adding people to your email list who have not opted in.
You must give the subscribers the option of opting out by providing an Unsubscribe button. The button should be placed prominently so that the subscriber is able to locate it easily.
You should also avoid deceiving customers by giving misleading information.
# 8. Analyse your email data:
The success of any email marketing campaign rests upon constant review of customer response and subsequent tweaks in campaign strategy.
Fortunately, all email software comes with a dashboard that can help you track your email campaigns.
It helps you learn the Open Rate that is the percentage of mails that were opened by subscribers. You can improve it by changing the subject line.
An equally important metric is the clickthrough rate. It tells you which calls to action (CTAs) are working and which are being ignored by the customers. You can review the CTAs and make suitable corrections.
You also learn as to how many emails are landing in the right email boxes. A high bounce rate is an indication that your email list is full of inactive, fake or outdated contacts and urgently needs to be updated.
The most worrisome metric is the number of unsubscribes. A high unsubscribe rate is a clear indication that there is something wrong with your email marketing campaign. Either your subscribers are not interested in your products or else the content of the emails needs to be changed. In either case, you need to come up with a corrective strategy.
These are not the only metrics that you can track. You can track the percentage of mail that is being marked as spam or is being rejected as unsolicited mail.
All these metrics can help you understand as to what is working and what is not. You can accordingly tweak your email marketing campaign to achieve your goals.
Related report
The secret of crafting an effective email marketing strategy