6 Things You Need to Prepare Your First Email Marketing Campaign

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So, you have your email marketing strategy ready and are ready to get started on your first email marketing campaign but don’t know where to start? You are at the right place! 

Many people get stuck when it’s time to kick off their first campaign because of how overwhelming it gets. There’s suddenly so much to do in such a little time. Well, good news! This article is prepared to take you on a smooth journey of creating your first email marketing campaign with little to no hassle. 

This is not to tell you the email marketing platform to choose or how to build your email list, as we’ve covered in previous posts. We’ll go straight to the point in this article and highlight the most important things you need to know. 

6 Things You Need to Know for an Effective Email Campaign

1. Start with the basics: your goal and audience

It is important to know the goal of your marketing campaign before kicking off and you need to develop a SMART goal to make this work. Instead of a generic goal like “I need to get more customers within the next year”, you can rather have something like “Increase conversion rate by 5% in the next three months by segmenting my list and improving email personalization”. The latter is more like it, as it redirects your focus. You should also define what success is for you, as this will help you determine what metrics to measure. 

Also, knowing your audience would help determine the kind of campaign to create and how to draft the email copy. It’s best to create buyer personas to understand how to serve your audience better.

2. Prepare the email copy

Now that you know your goal and audience, you need to start working on the content of the email. Before you get a professional copywriter to jump on it, you can do a bit of background work to determine what the email should contain. Figure out what the overall message would be for the entire campaign and if you’d be using drip emails, you must consider the content of each email. If you have ten emails in one campaign, you want to ensure that all ten align and pass a uniform message to your audience. 

An easy way to do this is to choose a topic for the campaign and focus on the message throughout. Once you’ve done the background work, you can then get a copywriter to do their magic.

If you’re just starting and would want to do it yourself, please note that writing an engaging copy isn’t a walk in the park. It starts with writing a catchy headline that would push your audience to click on it and read what’s in the email. Research has shown that 33% of all email recipients open emails because of a catchy subject. 

Once you’ve gotten their attention, you want to ensure you keep them engaged with the content of the email, such that they are convinced to take action at the end. 

Well, this isn’t always a straight road. You can do everything possible and not everyone would open your email or take action. However, you can increase your chances of winning at this by being intentional about your content. 

3. Email design and visuals

Email Marketing Campaign; MailDrip; Email design
Source: Tinuiti

As important as the email content is, you must also consider the email design. You could write the perfect copy but if the design is shabby and less appealing, your audience might find it difficult to read your email copy. Use cool and warm colors that align with what your brand represents and use a legible font that your readers won’t find difficult. 

Visuals are also important. Emails with graphics have been shown to have a higher open rate (27%) and click-through rate (4.5%) than text-based emails (20% and 3%). However, as much as visuals bring life into your content, you also do not want them to be excessive. Too many images, gifs, videos, etc can take a long time to load, especially for people with poor internet connection. Preferably, use the 80:20 text-to-media ratio, where 80% of the email content is text and 20% is visuals. 

An extra tip for images is to add alternative (alt) text, as it helps screen readers and people who can’t view images on their devices. 

4. Build a template

As you work on your email design, this will also be a good time to create a template that you can tweak for subsequent emails. Some email service providers already have templates that you can work with but you can still have one unique to your brand. This saves you time in the future while building more emails. 

5. Plan the flow of your campaign

Email Marketing Campaign; MailDrip; email campaign flow
Source: Automizy

Determine what the campaign would look like. This includes the number of emails required to make the campaign successful, the email segments involved and which email goes to which segment, and whether or not you will use link triggers.

You can also determine the interval between each email in the campaign. If you use MailDrip, this is quite straightforward, as the software already has the flow prepared for you. All you have to do is enter your campaign name and choose the interval between each of your emails. You can decide to send the third email a week after the first. 

6. Test and Schedule

Once your campaign is ready, it’s advisable to test it before sending it out to your audience. Send a test campaign to your email address or other team members and critique it from your audience’s point of view. Preferably, get someone else who isn’t on your team to test it and give you feedback. If it’s good to go, you can schedule it to automate the process while you focus on other things. 

Bottom Line

A lot of work goes into creating an email marketing campaign but the good news is that it gets better with time. For every campaign you create, check your analytics to see how well you did and what you could have done better. This will help you in subsequent campaigns as you work towards your marketing goals. 

However, you need a concrete email marketing strategy before even starting a campaign. We understand how overwhelming this can be, so the team at MailDrip came up with a perfect template for you. Simply fill out the form below to get a copy. 

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