Running a successful email marketing campaign benefits your business or brand in many ways. It is a great way to nurture leads to customers, make sales, raise brand awareness, and see a high return on investment.
The impact of email marketing over the years cannot be overemphasized. 89% of marketers use email as the primary channel for generating leads, and with over 4 billion email users daily, this is a gold mine.
While you might have learned a lot about email marketing from different sources, you still need to learn how to create successful campaigns. Not only creating them but also how to run them!
In this article, we will share with you the step-by-step process of how to run a successful email marketing campaign.
What is an Email Marketing Campaign?
An email marketing campaign refers to a series of emails that are sent out to several recipients over a period with a common goal. These emails are targeted and personalized and are all connected for a specific purpose.
The aim of creating an email marketing campaign is to get the email recipients to take action. This could be to make a purchase, download a document, sign up for an online class, or become a regular paying customer.
Regardless of what your marketing goals are, you can make them happen by being strategic about your campaigns. Each email in the campaign must be well-written, concise, easy to read and understand and pass a single message.
Types of Email Marketing Campaigns
To be strategic about your email marketing campaigns, you need to know the different types and where they apply. Some of the most popular and effective ones are explained below.
1. The Welcome Email Series
Now that you have added a new subscriber to your email list, what next? This is one of the most common, yet important parts of email marketing.
Welcome emails have an open rate of 91.9% and an average click-through rate that’s 4x higher than any other type of marketing email. By utilizing this properly, you can win a subscriber over and convince them to take action right from the first email.
First impressions are important and this is what the welcome email series does. Create a series of emails that will serve as a welcome guide. This could be about three to five concise emails that will do the work.
The purpose of this campaign is to welcome your new subscriber onboard and walk them through what to expect, while you tell them more about your brand.
Key things to consider during this phase include prioritizing building brand credibility, offering a gift or discount, and getting to know your new subscriber.
2. The Triggered Email Series
In this type of campaign, you can have a user’s action trigger a series of emails. This works effectively for email personalization and segmentation, as it ensures that your audience only gets emails targeted at them.
There are several ways to apply this. It could be that someone shopped on your online store and didn’t check out. It could also be that they clicked on a link in one of your emails or bought something from your store and that automatically triggers another email in line with that.
Research has shown that over 75% of email revenue is generated through triggered campaigns, rather than one-size-fits-all promo campaigns.
You can create a drip campaign on MailDrip that connects a series of emails based on the actions of the user. Getting an email marketing platform designed for this purpose makes it a lot easier.
3. The Abandoned Cart Series
This is similar to the triggered email series but also deserves to stand alone. This kind of campaign is triggered by the user’s actions, more specifically adding items to their cart but not buying them.
This can be due to several reasons. They probably had cold feet or did not trust the product or service enough to follow through to purchase. It could also be that they needed more conviction or simply could not afford it.
Regardless of the reason, you can increase their chances of making the purchase. Send a triggered email that includes a discount to push them to take action or give them more reasons to trust your brand.
According to MooSend, 45% of cart abandonment emails are opened on average and 21% are clicked on, which means you have a higher chance of conversion than when you do not take any action.
4. The Promotional Email Campaign
Promotional email campaigns are quite common, as they focus on promoting a sale, discount, or special offer to win more customers over. To make the most of these campaigns, you need to be strategic and make the emails more personalized.
This is one of the best ways to generate immediate revenue and increase your customer retention rate.
5. The Newsletter
Newsletters aren’t exactly considered a campaign but are a great way to keep your subscribers engaged. As you wrap up a campaign or prepare to start a new one, your consistent newsletters will help keep your subscribers in the loop with your brand.
This is a great way to keep a line of communication with your audience while also building brand loyalty and growing your audience.
Effective Email Marketing Campaign Examples
The ultimate goal of any email marketing campaign can only be achieved if an effective strategy is put in place. Here are some examples from different companies that have proven effective so far:
1. Netflix
Netflix creates its campaigns based on customer behavior, which in this case is their watch history and activity on the app. They work on curating shows that the users might like; the emails are short, skimmable, and with enough visuals to not bore you. It also includes a “Top Picks for You” section that provides personalized recommendations.
2. Starbucks
The marketing campaign type used here is the Promotion type. Any Starbucks lover who sees a 50% discount will most likely jump at the offer without thinking twice. It will also help new or potential customers make an easy decision in sticking with the brand.
3. Loft
In this email, Loft is asking their subscribers to manage their email preferences. To only provide personalized emails, they invited each subscriber to make the edits themselves. This works well with email segmentation, where you get to send different emails to different segments, thereby creating and sharing targeted content only.
4. DropBox
This is an example of a triggered email. Here, DropBox is offering bonus space for anyone who refers others through their personalized referral link.
This method encourages more people to refer others, which eventually becomes a win-win situation. Word-of-mouth marketing is estimated to account for 13% of consumer sales and DropDox leverages that.
Here’s another email sample from Dropbox encouraging users to try their other products. Whether you enjoy using Dropbox or only signed up and used it once, you can have access to the template library.
5. Charity: Water
Charity: Water uses email campaigns to promote its donation site. They use emotional marketing and present a human feel to their brand that convinces you to take action.
How to Create an Email Marketing Campaign
Now that you are ready to create your first email marketing campaign, how do you do that? Remember it’s about building an effective campaign that will yield results. Here are some helpful tips and practices to guide you.
1. Set Your Goals
You need to set SMART goals before creating an email marketing campaign. This will help you determine what the campaign is set to achieve and guide you as you work on the strategy.
Do you want to promote a new product? Do you want to update your audience regularly? Do you want to share stories about your brand? Do you want to follow up on an abandoned cart?
Knowing this will help you choose the right campaign type to work on. For example, if you simply want to stay top of mind, you need a newsletter.
2. Build Your Email List
The first thing after setting your goals is to build your email list. This might involve creating buyer personas to understand who your audience is and the kind of data you will collect.
By default, you will have their email addresses. But to spice things up and make your emails more personalized, you can add form fields for their First and Last names, Addresses or Regions, Birthdays, and Product Interests.
You can also segment your list based on your audience’s interest, as this will help you create more targeted and intentional campaigns.
3. Create and Name Your Campaign
Name your campaign to help you identify it later, especially if you’ll eventually be working on more campaigns over time. Each email in the campaign should also have enticing subject lines. A study has found that 64% of consumers decide to open emails based on the quality of their subject line.
Key things to keep in mind while writing your subject are to be specific, give the recipient an incentive to open the email, insert humor, and personalize it.
4. Design Your Emails
While you create authentic and personalized content for your campaign, remember to support it with visuals. Good email marketing designs help with faster load time, improve reader’s experience, increase conversion rate, and also help with consistent branding.
Try to maintain the 80:20 rule, where you have 80% of text and 20% of visuals to balance out the content.
5. Be Conversational
One of the best ways to create an effective email campaign is to get your audience’s attention as much as you can. Let your emails be conversational and have them looking forward to the next.
Insert their First Names into the emails at intervals for personalization, tell a story that keeps them hooked, and give your emails a human feel as much as you can. No one wants to keep reading emails that sound as though robots wrote them.
6. Track Your Campaigns
After sending out your campaign, the next thing you must keep up with is the analytics. Track every email sent out, watch the performance, and see what you could be doing better.
Most email marketing service providers already make this easier. On ESPs like MailChimp or MailDrip, you can see detailed analytics that will help you understand how your campaign is performing.
Key metrics to look out for include the Open Rate, Click-through Rate, and Conversion Rate.
Bottom Line
To run a successful email campaign, you need more than just an idea. You need to create a working strategy that sets you on the right path for your business. In this article, we have highlighted the key things you need to know that will guide you from your very first campaign until you can have your big break.
However, we understand how daunting and time-consuming this can be. This is why you need a team to help you get started and stay on course. At MailDrip, we have a team of professionals to guide you on this journey. Feel free to contact us to show you the ropes and provide a solid team to handle your campaigns.
You can also give it a try yourself but first, you need a strategy. We have created a free email marketing strategy template to help you get started.
All you have to do is fill out the form below and you’ll get it in your email!
