Email marketing provides companies with various techniques to boost their customer loyalty campaigns, offer promotions of their products or services and send downloadable content offers (ebooks, whitepapers, templates, etc.) to stimulate subscribers’ learning.
If the website, social networks and blog posts represent means of interaction that connect companies with their followers, email marketing creates more personalized scenarios, where true trust can be generated with potential buyers.
Using emails as a marketing tool implies direct communication with the public, with added advantages such as the possibility of segmenting and leading the strategies that are carried out. Although emails have existed for many years, they have never lost their power to strategically disseminate valuable and useful content to Internet users.
In this sense, creating a successful campaign becomes an important task for those organizations that wish to strategically launch a particular product and/or service to the market. Teaching you what information to send in your email advertising, how and when it is appropriate to do so, will be our objective in the following lines.
How to create an email marketing campaign?
1. Determine who makes up your audience
You must first analyze who your readers will be, and thus know what is the most appropriate language to address them. Likewise, what are the messages that will best connect with your needs and motivations. Never forget the valuable information that the profiles of your buyer personas can provide you, which will help you know how the mentality of your potential clients works.
Establishing who makes up your audience is very important to receive the acceptance that your campaign deserves. Hubspot, a pioneer in inbound marketing, recommends that we create emails based on content and context. This context refers to the set of circumstances and situations that can occur around an event, in this case, around your campaign.
Determining how your strategy will impact your audience will help you better understand the context in which you should develop the campaign. This task requires a thorough study of who will be the people who will be on the other side of the screen, opening and feeling interest in your service offers.
2. Segment your database
Any email campaign that is respected must have a large contact database. These contacts must be collected under the principles of inbound marketing, whose visitors to your website must provide. Therefore, for your campaign to have the success it deserves, you must segment that audience.
Hubspot reveals that emails sent to segmented lists receive 62% more clicks than those sent to non-segmented lists. In addition, providing the correct information to an ideal segment allows you to have a lower desertion rate from your email lists.
You can segment your audience by geographic data (country IP, time zones, area codes, addresses, etc.), corporate data (company type, company sizes, industry, if the companies to which you send your campaigns have B2B models or B2C, etc.), behavioral data to evaluate the interest of your leads (conversion actions, email openings, page views, etc.).
3. Choose the tools you are going to use
Your goal will always be for your database (leads) and the number of people subscribed to your blog to grow exponentially. In this sense, you must have tools that allow you to automate the mass sending of these emails quickly and efficiently. Marketing automation should become your main ally since it will allow you to speed up this process through software that does that work for you.
Can you imagine having to manually send 500 emails every day? It can be an exhausting process, requiring a large amount of human capital that, at the same time, you must do without to make the most of your resources. It is preferable that you use specialized tools such as: Mailchimp, Campaigner, Aweber, Mailrelay, Get Response, among others to manage this process. So it is best that you choose an easy-to-use tool that adapts to the objectives and design you want for your campaign.
4. Identify the best time to send your campaign
A Deloitte survey has revealed that 40% of Internet users check their email inbox five minutes after waking up and 30% also do so five minutes before going to sleep. In this sense, try to send your marketing campaigns approximately at these times. However, as it becomes more receptive, you will be able to evaluate, based on the behavior of your audience, what is the best time to send them.
5. Includes “Call to action” and social media buttons
A call to action (also known as “call to action”) is a word, phrase, image or button that invites your readers to take a specific action. This conjugation of verbs and words highlighted as a button within a particular content hides behind the intention of converting visitors to that content into leads or sales opportunities.
Calls to action represent that first step to start your conversion process and increase your chances of obtaining a final purchase. If you combine them with social media buttons
, you give your readers the opportunity to view other types of content.
For example, you can create a strategy to promote an educational workshop for your clients and add a call to action that invites them to buy their tickets. You can also add access links to your Facebook, Instagram and Twitter profiles so that your readers can see images of your previous events. This way you can encourage them to attend. Remember that the idea is to monetize your content and motivate your subscribers to buy a product and/or service, so including action buttons will be key to achieving this.
6. Adapt the design of your emails to mobile formats
Experian, a data, analytics and marketing services company, claims that 54% of emails are opened from a mobile device. Based on the strong impact that smartphones have had on people’s daily lives, it is not surprising that more than half of Internet users access their inboxes through these devices.
Without a doubt, it can be a fairly simple and practical task to read our emails from our cell phones. Therefore, it is recommended that you adapt their designs so that they look good on both large and small screens.
If you make your content “responsive”, it will not lose visual impact and will be appreciated from any technological platform. You can use templates that allow you to adapt the size and shape of your emails, so as not to leave any content incomplete or out of sight.
7. Involve your graphic identity at all times
Although your marketing campaigns should not be invasive with the advertising aspect, you should not stop incorporating graphic elements that connect with the reader. We recommend that you add your color palette, your slogan, your logo, images and/or videos to your campaigns that help the reader understand what your campaign is about, etc.
Visual support is very important, especially if it is a product that is coming to market for the first time. Remember to use templates for your campaigns that give you the opportunity to add these elements, but without going overboard too much. Mailchimp, for example, allows you to choose between multiple email designs with which you can work with your email marketing campaigns.
8. Set the budget
Like any advertising campaign, establishing the email marketing budget is one of the tasks you must perform, even before all the others. Consider that, although it is one of the most successful digital marketing campaigns, an incorrect budget calculation can even be harmful to other areas. To avoid going overboard, consider the following aspects:
- Number of shipments (daily, weekly, monthly).
- Number of subscribers.
- Custom templates.
- Quantity of shipments by strategies.
- Seasonality.
- Conversion rate.
- User segmentation.
- ROI.
- Tool to use.
What should you avoid in an email marketing campaign?
- Bombard your contacts with email. Completely avoid sending excessive emails. That is why you must take into account a correct mailing strategy.
- Skip the Call to action. Without them, the user will simply have no way to reach your website and, consequently, you will have no leads.
- Do not take into account your buyer persona. As simple as looking at all the buyer personas that you extract from your general target, you will have all the information to personalize and also separate the sending of emails.
- Do not consider the customer journey. This will cause the client to receive random emails that do not respond to their needs. It can even cause the user to unsubscribe.
- Avoid offers, coupons or promotional codes. These are very good tools to take the customer directly to purchasing the product, even if they were not yet at the interest stage.
- Forgetting to thank the new subscriber. In fact, the more personalized the thank you and welcome to the new subscribers of your newsletter, the more encouraged they will be to read your emails.
In short, a successful email strategy must comply with these techniques so that they have the appropriate impact on the appropriate audiences. Always remember to evaluate the content and context you want to create to correctly convey your messages.
Before sending an email always consider the following scenario:
If I met the characteristics of my buyer persona, would I open this email in my inbox? If the answer is positive, extraordinary! Don’t be afraid to carry out your digital marketing strategies and then measure your results.
