First Steps Towards Preparing Email Marketing

Email marketing is sending emails by a company of its products or services to existing or potential customers.  It is an essential component of a digital marketing plan. It is effective to drive conversions of potential customers into company leads. It is one of the efficient and affordable ways to reach the company’s audience and build brand loyalty. 

A successful email marketing campaign will help you gain leads and sales by engaging your recipients with your business and lead them to take the required action of purchasing your products or availing your services. Thus, email marketing is the perfect tool for building customer relationships. Below are the steps for preparing a successful email marketing campaign. 

Establish Your Goals

The first step is to decide your goals and what you want to communicate in the email. While determining the goals of your emails, align them with your company’s broader marketing goals. When you plan on what you want to achieve in the emails, it will be easier to identify the audience and help you create high-performing email campaigns to achieve your marketing goals. 

Ensure the goals of your email are specific, measurable, relevant and attainable. It provides a framework for your email marketing campaigns. Generally, the goals of an email marketing campaign include welcoming new subscribers/customers, promoting your content or product, nurturing your existing customer base and sending targeted emails by segmenting your subscribers.

Prepare an Email List

After establishing your email marketing goals, you need to build an email list. The method to create your email list depends on your goals. Usually, the email list consists of leads interested in what you offer. Your email list can include your customers whom you can convert as subscribers. If you do not have email addresses, you can collect and develop your email list by using the following methods:

• Adding a call-to-action on your website.
• Promoting your newsletter on social media.
• Inviting people to sign up for an email list at events in your company.
• Collecting email addresses at the point of sale to retain existing customers.
• Offering coupons and gifts on your website/store to customers who sign up or enrol.

Decide on the Type of Email Campaign

There are various types of emails that can be sent to your subscribers. It is important to decide the email type then proceed with drafting the emails as each email type is different and needs to be prepared accordingly. You need to select the email type that will help you achieve your goals. The different types of email campaigns are as follows:

• Newsletter – A newsletter email is usually sent on a monthly basis containing the stream of topics and articles that are of interest to your subscribers and related to your company products/services.
• Information emails – These emails provide educative information on a specialised topic related to your organisation, such as rules and guidelines, information on your product, etc. 
• Announcement – An announcement campaign email is sent to your subscribers announcing a new product, service or feature. These emails provide information to the subscribers of your latest products or features. 
• Product update – These emails are sent to state updates in your existing products or services, declaration updates, model updates, etc. 
• Event Invitation – An event invitation email is designed to raise awareness of your company event and encourage subscribers or customers to attend them.
• Marketing offer – A marketing offer email is sent to the subscribers to drive response. Special discounts or promotions on the company product or services are sent in these emails that will help drive sales directly. 

Identify Your Audience

Segmentation of your email list is an essential part of your email marketing plan. After you prepare the email list and decide on the email type, select and shortlist the correct audience for your email campaign. The email marketing campaign will succeed when it is sent to the targeted audience rather than everyone.

Every customer may not have the same needs or relationship with your business. Thus, identifying your audience helps you to choose what type of content needs to be sent to which subscriber. When you personalise content and make it relevant to a specific group, your response rate improves. 

You can segment your customers through digital media by using Google Analytics and Facebook Insights. Both will help you gather information on location, interests, demographics, other metrics and provide a snapshot of your customers’ interests. You can create segments from your email list based on the following aspects to send targeted content and increase click-throughs in your campaigns:

• Geographic location – You can send store-specific or area-specific products or services to the subscribers in the respective locations/areas and ignore out-of-location subscribers where the message would be irrelevant.
• Market – You may segment your subscribers based on the market/industry interest and send them industry, product or market-specific content. 
• Past activity – You can segment your customers by their past open and click-through behaviour. You can determine what type of content works best for a specific segment and send the relevant content to them.
• Customer data – You can use your company’s customer data and send discounts or offers to VIP customers or targeting customers who may not have purchased your product or service for a specific time to retain them. 

Create an Email Calendar

Create an email calendar where you can record what content is sent on which day. Note down what you need to send in a month to your subscribers and its date on the email calendar. You can also add the date of sending the follow-up emails to your subscribers if they do not respond to the initial email on the calendar. 

Stick to the schedule of your calendar so that you do not overwhelm your subscribers by sending too many emails or repeated emails. Sending too many emails can make your subscribers unsubscribe, and sending too few may lose their attention. The calendar will help you stay on track with your email marketing campaign.

You can also conduct a survey or poll to ask your subscribers on subscriber input on email scheduling. In this way, you can establish a good connection between your company and customers and avoid email spam.

Write the Email Copy

You need to write a compelling email copy to engage your subscribers. You need to structure your emails properly to draw subscribers into reading your content while guiding them towards the email’s CTA. An effective email contains an interesting subject line, email copy with graphics wherever possible and Call-To-Action (CTA) button. 

Simple emails work better than writing text-heavy, long email campaigns. The email’s design needs to be a responsive email template, so your email automatically resizes whether people are reading it on a desktop, phone or tablet.

Email subject line

The starting point for a successful email marketing campaign is the subject line. It plays a significant role in getting your subscribers to open and click your emails. Ideally, the subject lines are short of about one sentence. If you cannot fit everything you wish to say in your subject line, you can add it in the email’s preview text. A preview text of your email allows you to expand and state the thoughts that you wish to state before a recipient opens your message.

Email content creation

You need to start your email with a hook sentence/para that will interest your audience in scrolling down and reading more. Keep the copy short and address your subscriber by their name. Personalised emails have more success rates. Pick the email tone that works best for all your targeted audience since each audience is different.

Images in email copy

Images in your email copy can enhance and improve the engagement of your subscribers. However, the wrong images can distract the recipients from the purpose of your email. Choose the images carefully to improve the experience of your readers. Look for images that represent your email campaign, concept or topics included in your email. Add graphs or infographics where it suits best on the email copy. Charts and infographics draw the attention of the readers.

Email CTA

The last part of your email marketing copy is the Call-To-Action (CTA) link/button. CTAs help you to gain leads and usually appear multiple times throughout your email copy. The CTA will be at the start, in the middle and the end in a simple line.

Review Your Email Copy

Once you have drafted your email, review the email copy before sending it to your subscribers. Reviewing your email copy helps to minimise the chance of sending emails with mistakes. Check for spelling and grammar errors, incorrect or broken links before you send them. You can even ask your colleagues or teammates to go through your email and check them. 

You can send a test email to your teammate to check the email appearance, links and formatting. After a thorough review of the email copy, you can immediately dispatch it to your targeted audience or schedule them according to your email calendar.

Measure Your Results 

You need to measure and monitor your emails after sending them. You can begin monitoring the success of your email campaign once it is opened and clicked by your subscribers. You can look at data points like click-thru-rate, open rate and unsubscribe rate to see how your subscribers perceived your email. 

You can also track the conversion rate, i.e. how many subscribers purchased your product or showed interest in purchasing your product/service from your email. Track the success of your email marketing every month and monitor your growth over time. It will provide an idea of what content is popular, what draws your customers and how to improve it. 

Review Your Email Marketing Plan

Your email marketing campaigns and target goals will evolve over time. When you track your email marketing campaigns, you may realise that you need to change the approach, send more emails, change content, or adjust CTAs. You might have to change your segmentation over time and include or exclude subscribers from a segment. Thus, review your overall marketing email plan from time to time.

Even if the current email marketing plan is working for you and getting the desired results, review and set higher goals for the next few months so you can continue to succeed. You must collect and test data to improve your future campaigns. 

Email marketing helps you to drive leads and retain your subscribers. Experiment with email marketing and see what works best for you. The more you get to know what your audiences require, the more you can scale your program and deliver meaningful messages through your email that will drive engagement from time to time.

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