How to execute a successful email marketing campaign

Only a skilled marketer can execute a successful email marketing campaign. From planning new strategies to putting everything into practice, there is a lot of knowledge involved. 

Making people open their emails is harder than you might think. It’s important to realize that, as soon as possible. It’s the only way to avoid falling into your comfort zone.

How come it is difficult to make people open their emails? Inboxes are constantly flooded with a lot of messages every day. Some of them are automated emails, others are spam, and just a few of them correspond to the messages that are going to be opened and read.

Your email address can get mixed up with uninteresting or unknown senders, making your messages be ignored and deleted. As if they never existed in the first place.

Executing a successful email marketing campaign is the most difficult task to be performed by marketers. But they have to do it frequently.

Trying to make things easier, we prepared this article, with some suggestions on how to execute an email campaign. We hope, when you reach the end of the article, you will be able to plan new strategies and also have less pressure at work.

• What is an email marketing campaign?
• How to execute an email marketing campaign?
• Useful tips to execute an email marketing campaign

What is an email marketing campaign?

Email marketing campaigns can be defined as messages that companies send to communicate with current and potential customers.

We are talking about a coordinated set of emails that are sent individually. They are delivered to the targeted audience across a defined period of time, trying to reach a previously planned goal. These goals are usually clear in a Call to Action sentence.

These emails have specific objectives, which vary from nurturing leads to encouraging engagement. That’s why such messages need to be carefully planned and targeted to the right audience.

Email campaigns are considered an important part of inbound marketing, in which marketers meet different segments of their audiences in whatever step of the sales funnel they are currently in.

In other words, campaigns are an ongoing process. You should know that not every contact on your list is ready to buy products at the exact same moment. Thus, you can explore communication through email to reach people at different stages of the purchasing process.

The first thing you should do when you are planning an email marketing campaign is to build an email list with contacts of people who have demonstrated interest in your brands and products.

After getting their consent, you can start sending emails, making them advance in the sales funnel. You can explore email marketing campaigns for the following purposes:

• use email to generate traffic to your platforms: you can promote your different channels with strategically designed emails, directing recipients to visit your blog, landing pages, or websites, with click-through buttons;
  
• use email marketing campaigns to raise awareness of your brand: many people who have subscribed to your channels are not ready to purchase yet. You can use email for educational matters, introducing your brand and products, showing the solutions and benefits that they can offer, convincing them to make a decision in a short term period;
  
• explore email to the lead nurturing process: emails can provide valuable information to make prospective clients advance on the sales funnel. By exploring conversion-focused content, you can turn interested clients into paying customers;
  
• consider emails to gain revenue: selling to people who have already performed a purchase and approved the product or service can be an excellent way to gain revenue. This way, you can use email marketing campaigns to promote upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

As you could notice, email marketing campaigns have different objectives and can be explored in a myriad of ways. It’s all up to you, the moment that your company is in, the kind of subscribers you have, or the product currently being advertised.

To make an email marketing campaign successful, you should adopt some strategies. They are valid for all kinds of campaigns since they are employed to highlight their overall performance.

Read on and you will be able to boost your marketing strategies.

How to execute an email marketing campaign

Now that you are acquainted with email marketing campaigns and their different goals, we should pay attention to initiatives that can highlight their strengths and hide their weaknesses.

Identify the goals of your email marketing campaign

If you are wondering why your email campaigns aren’t effective at all, remember that billions of emails are sent every day, which means you have to compete for the user’s attention.

Getting someone’s attention is challenging. If your email marketing campaigns aren’t planned around the goals you would like to achieve, things can get a little tougher. You must identify and set your goals, and by goals, you can think of some aspects, such as:

• welcome purposes: this email campaign is planned to welcome new subscribers, and thank them for their support. It’s the perfect opportunity to introduce your brand, most sold or most popular products, without forgetting the solutions and benefits that your company offers. It should be the start of a relationship based on trust and loyalty;
  
• engagement purposes: when you are planning an email marketing campaign with the main goal of increasing conversions or responses from subscribers, you are trying to increase your engagement. Invest in appealing Call to Action phrases, amazing content, and awesome promotional sales to be advertised through email marketing campaigns;
  
• nurturing leads purposes: these email campaigns try to make a new lead advance on the sales funnel. To reach this goal, you must offer something of value in exchange for some kind of interaction on your platforms;
  
• re-engagement purposes: when subscribers are no longer responsive, they must be removed from your lists of contacts. You should do that because they hurt your email deliverability and engagement rates. Before taking such a drastic measure, you can plan a re-engagement campaign, to call these users’ attention once again. For instance, you can re-engage users by offering a special discount or remembering the subscribers to finish the purchase they have started. Mentioning abandoned carts is also a possibility. If they remain inactive, then they should be removed.
  
• segmenting purposes: different people also have distinct needs and desires. You shouldn’t organize email marketing campaigns to send the same message to everyone. This will be bad for your engagement and deliverability. Instead of doing this, you must segment your audience and plan different campaigns, aimed at different audiences. This way, you will have more conversions and sales.

All these kinds of email marketing campaigns will have different outcomes. Depending on the objective you have in mind, you can associate these email campaigns with metrics, to collect quantitative data, verifying if the goal was achieved or not.

Build a segmented email list

When you are talking to everyone, nobody is really listening to you. This is common sense and it’s true. It’s important to have this kind of mindset when you are setting objectives and planning a new campaign.

You should organize your email lists, sending targeted emails that are relevant to different groups that compose them. Use the criteria that you judge as fundamental for each email marketing campaigns, such as:

• targeting only new users or the oldest one;
• offering exclusive promotional sales to only one specific location;
• writing content that communicates with the younger or older population;
• and so on.

You should build a segmented email list, depending on which objectives you have at the moment. This is going to increase engagement rates, achieving more conversions and sales.

Always speak to the recipient directly, eliminating any kind of generalization approach. This must be done through high-value, interesting, relevant, and personalized content.

Email list management is an important step in any email marketing campaign, once it makes you deliver the right messages to the right people at the right time.

Understand the different uses of email types

There are different types of emails. They can be explored according to the objectives you set for a certain email campaign. Check some types of emails for your marketing campaigns:

• welcome emails: a message that is sent to users after they finish filling out registration forms, as well as to thank them for their time. It’s an opportunity to make a special offer, encouraging earlier engagement from the newcomer;
  
• transactional emails: these emails are meant to be sent to only one person, once they contain expected information, such as a confirmation order, a receipt, invoices, and personal notification, such as password requests and resets. They have a high Open Rate because their content is extremely relevant for the user or even indispensable;
  
• reminder emails: they are also directed to only one person each time. They are used to remind a user to finish an action, such as an unfinished payment, or make the user remember about an event, such as a lecture, webinar, or training;
  
• newsletters: these emails are educational and informative. They are usually employed to raise brand awareness or educate subscribers about a topic of their deep interest;

• lead nurturing emails: messages that are written with the objective of making subscribers advance on the sales funnel fall into this category. They are successful only when subscribers become paying customers. That’s why they are appealing, creative, and bring a strong Call to Action sentence or a special offer;
  
• feedback emails: these messages are sent to users in order to collect data to improve your business. You can ask for feedback when you are trying to change your channels of communication or release a product. They are also useful for evaluating your sales process because you can ask subscribers how the final delivery was. You might use these feedback messages to improve your business and/or for publicity purposes.
  

These are some of the types of emails that can be explored. After you decide what the objective of the email strategy is, you should start thinking about what type of email is going to fit this campaign.

Know your target audience

Email marketing campaigns will be successful only if you know everything about your target audience. And, if you want to know your audience better, there are a series of questions that you should ask yourself.

• To whom do I sell my products? 
• Are my products made for the male or female group? 
• Are my products made for younger or older people? 
• Where is my audience located? 
• What are the interests of the subscribers? 
• What does the target audience expect from my company?

Knowing the answer to these questions is important to define how the email strategy is going to be conducted. If you don’t know what your target audience is, the campaign is likely to fail.

Another thing that could be done is to keep track of your email marketing campaigns, to validate a hypothesis and answer a few other questions.

• Which groups are responding and interacting more? 
• Where are they located? 
• How old are they? 
• Are they composed of males or females?

This way, you can adapt and fix campaigns, always aiming at higher results. Knowing your target audience is essential to making email marketing efficient.

Not only that, but targeting the right subscribers is great to protect your sender score, as it keeps your engagement levels high.

Improve your landing pages and opt-ins

The process of making someone subscribe to your channels must be quite straightforward. Otherwise, people might feel discouraged to finish filling out registration forms.

If you keep the sign-up process simple and quick, you will see more people giving you their email addresses.

That’s why improving your landing pages and opt-in forms is important. You can’t lose prospective clients because your forms are too boring or too complex to fill out.

Ask only what is necessary, asking only relevant questions about identification, intentions, and interest. This way, you can use this data to organize your email lists.

You can also use strategies to make the sign-up process intuitive, by giving the interested users options of answers, instead of making them type everything. 

In relation to landing pages, you can’t forget to include valuable information about the product or service that is being advertised. You can use some videos, photos, instructions, and even testimonials, to make people give their email addresses for further contact.

Finally, don’t forget to be found. Advertise your landing pages through social media, the official website, or email marketing.

By collecting more emails, you can execute email marketing campaigns more efficiently, since it will broaden your reach. Speaking to an audience that is engaged and interested can bring awesome results to your company, in the form of conversions and sales.

Choose the right tools

Technology can help us do many things, from the simplest tasks to the most complex ones. The same applies to email marketing campaigns.

Learning how to choose an email marketing tool is as important as planning the campaign itself. These services allow you to:

• create templates to be used in the design and production of the email, saving a lot of time and optimizing the whole creation process;
  
• integrate with your own database, which is an excellent feature when you want to analyze email marketing metrics and KPIs;
  
• use it to organize your audience into groups in an automated way;

• generate automated reports, which is ideal when you want to have an in-depth analysis of your email marketing campaigns fast;
  
• use an email checker service to verify and check the validity of email addresses, so you can achieve real mailboxes and protect your deliverability. SafetyMails is one of the most recommended options that are available in the market nowadays.

These aspects are only a few benefits that choosing the right tools can bring to your company. If you want to speed up the planning process, adopt the right marketing tools that are adequate for your line of business and necessities.

Plan your emails and follow-ups

Executing and conducting an email marketing campaign requires a lot of planning. We can point out some stages of the planning process, such as:

• the first step should be setting goals and strategies to achieve them, which will be carried out during the email marketing campaign;
  
• the second step is related to defining the email type that is going to be sent to your audience;
  
• the third step is to attract your target audience to your communication platforms, such as the website and landing pages;
  
• after doing that, the fourth step is to collect email addresses that belong to your target audience, building an open channel for email exchange. Don’t forget to get consent at this stage;

• now it’s time to send your previously planned emails to the addresses that you have attracted, which is our fifth step;
  
• the sixth stage is related to the adaptation process of your campaign. You are aware of how people are responding to your messages, and you can tell what’s working and what’s failing. In this stage, you can fix your campaign to get more conversions through follow-ups.

These stages can help you organize and plan an email marketing campaign. Moreover, you must pay attention to the follow-up messages because they will introduce your services and products gradually, preparing a prospective subscriber for the final phase of the sales funnel, the purchase.

You must have a schedule for follow-up messages. It can’t be too early, nor too late. In email marketing campaigns, preparation is the key to success. Because of that, follow-up emails must be:

• relevant;
• timely;
• valuable;
• interesting;
• driven to conversion.

Monitor your metrics and results

When an email marketing campaign comes to an end, it’s time to analyze data, verifying the results, the good and the bad ones.

This process is all about learning. Predicting how people will behave when they see your messages is one of the biggest challenges for markets. Numbers and data can provide a truthful picture of the current reality of your company.

Keeping track of email marketing metrics and KPIs is also an efficient way to test your initiatives and validate hypotheses. Also, you can test:

• design and layout;
• Call to Action sentences;
• sending time;
• email marketing copy;
• subject lines;
• experiment with different audiences
• and more;

Testing is the best way to always improve your email marketing campaigns. Also, there are metrics and KPIs that you must keep an eye on, such as the:

• Open Rate;
• Click-through Rate;
• Bounce Rate;
• Unsubscribe Rate;
• Forward Rate. 

These metrics and KPIs are like portraits of how your campaigns are performing.

When data is analyzed, you are not only able to improve your email marketing campaigns, but you also can protect your deliverability and domain reputation. This is as important as achieving many conversions because a healthy reputation can avoid many problems related to spam.

Useful tips to execute an email marketing campaign

Now that you are pretty acquainted with the concept of email marketing campaigns, it’s time to go even further. Check the following additional tips to be applied in your future campaigns, making the most of them.

• The emails that compose your marketing campaign must be carefully written, with special attention to the subject line, which can be balanced between interesting and convincing at the same time. Don’t over promise its content, because you will be judged by your recipients if you do so.
  
• The CTA sentences should receive special care during the planning of an email campaign. They have to be highlighted and call people’s attention to it. Moreover, the clearer the command, the more conversions you can get. Don’t ask the subscriber to do many things at the same time.
  
• Don’t wait too long to send follow-up messages. Subscribers can forget the content of the first message and don’t engage with the second. The emails should be sent regularly.
  
• Pay attention to design. Most people open their mailboxes through the phone or mobile devices. Your email must resize automatically when opened on a smartphone.
  
• Images can enrich and illustrate the content of your email. However, there are a lot of people who disable images in email exchanges. It’s a good idea to rely on text in your email marketing campaigns.
  
• The content is the main character in email marketing campaigns. If you need some ideas to write your messages, we recommend a personal history, a case of success, and exclusive news about your company or industry. The storytelling technique to introduce a product is another suggestion.
  
• Incentive interaction in your email exchanges. Ask users to answer a poll, a survey, or descriptive questions. You can offer something of value in return. Their feedback can be used to improve your business, besides increasing engagement.
  
• Avoid spammy words in the subject line and body of text at all costs.
  
• You can call subscribers by their name, and do everything within your reach to personalize and humanize the relationship you are currently building, especially with newcomers.
  
• Put yourself in the place of your subscribers. Understand why they subscribed to your channel in the first place and think about the user experience all the time. This way, you can have more engagement.
  
• Make the opt-out button be seen. This will prevent your email address from being marked as spam. Besides, it helps you maintain your email list clean. These buttons are usually located in the footer of emails.

If after this content you want to put your email marketing campaign in practice, learn first about the email deliverability to achieve the goals you want. 

Why is it important to implement an email verification service in your strategy?

When you build an email database, you surely want to have real people connected in your lists.

However, many people give a fake email address or an invalid one. They can simply make silly spelling mistakes during the registration process in your landing page or newsletters, for example.

SafetyMails has an expertise in prevent your whole strategy went to waste because you ended up with several addresses that are not fit to use. In other words, using our email verifier, your collected addresses are real, and can generate engagement.

In case of typos, the service can solicit corrections and reviews, making sure you don’t lose a promising lead. Everything happens in real-time and the email checker api is accurate and fast.

Would you like to know us better? Test now and check emails for free!

Choose SafetyMails and see how easy it is to make sure no invalid or harmful addresses get to your subscriber lists!