What to Include for a Successful Email Campaign

You’ve seen the value in email marketing and jumped on the e-campaign bandwagon. Every month you’ve been scheduling a newsletter to go out to your clients. The monthly analytics report comes in – some users opened it, some clicked on your CTA, some ignored your efforts entirely, and some have bounced around the galactic innerwebs and are downright missing. You have the data but aren’t sure how to translate it. You wonder, was my email successful or did I just waste my time?

E-campaigns can be the biggest waste of time if there is no value to the receiver. I know I don’t want to receive messages about things that don’t help my business, make me stop and think, or convince me to reconsider a decision. And junk email – please don’t waste my time! But if you educate me, teach me something I don’t know, teach me something I need to know, or make me an offer I can’t refuse… well that’s worth me reading!

Making sure you are sending the right message to the right people is key in email marketing.  If I work for a school, don’t send me solutions for a hotel; and if I work for a hotel, don’t send me info geared towards a bar, unless I am the Bar Manager and you targeted me properly.  Data is King.  If you don’t have a solid data base, invest in building one so the emails actually go to the people who want the info.

Implement the following strategies into your email marketing campaigns and you won’t have to wonder whether it “worked” or not:

• Don’t Show Up to the Party Emptyhanded – You are a guest in each user’s inbox, so you don’t want to sit there without an appropriate amount of solutions for items they lack. If you are going to interrupt someone’s day, you’d better have something worthwhile. Whether that be a product or service they might need, a ‘How To’ tutorial on a project they might want to begin, or an infographic of raw data that can help them better understand how to build something – you just have to show up with something that makes sense.
• Build Your Contact List – The easiest way to get contacts to subscribe to your list is to create a banner or signup on your website. A high conversion tactic is to offer some kind of incentive. For example, you might create a product to offer for free or giveaway a certain product you already have but know clients are hesitate to purchase without a test run. Another idea is to offer users a monthly newsletter or discount on something your business offers.
• Consistently Write Good Content – If you have all the pieces together for a great email, but your content is less than quality, you are going to lose credibility with the reader. Include a CTA on all your campaigns and follow through with promises for best results.
• Unsubscribe Button – You will want to have an easy out for users who no longer wish to receive your emails. Not having this available can ruin your brand. You don’t want to be known as the brand with the annoying emails! Your emails are meant to help people, not create more work. You will also want to consider email marketing laws, which you can find at CAN-SPAM and GDPR.
• Batch Your Eblast Ideas – You don’t want to only offer sales pitches in your campaigns, you want users to see the value in taking the time to read them. If a customer expects you to pitch every so often, it will come as less surprise and they won’t be as put off by it. Make sure to organize your emails so there is flow to how they are being delivered. Balance a healthy mix of messages such as product updates with a friendly personal message one week, and then a newsletter with a pitch the next week.

If you have adopted the thinking that email marketing is dead – think again! It’s a sales strategy that continues to be useful in most industries. When you learn how to do email marketing the right way, you will find it less stressful. Because there is no template that encompasses all types of businesses, you’ll need to adopt which of these tactics works best for you. Now let’s get blasting!