Email Campaigns

Chances are if you have a computer or device of any kind you probably have an email address, or five, and your inbox is likely filled with email subscriptions from all kinds of sites you have visited. While many of us do our communicating through text and social media now, emails are still a great source for companies to stay connected with their audience and engage future leads. If you have a business or organization then email campaigns should be part of your marketing strategy.

What is an Email Campaign?

Very simply put, an email campaign is the act of generating content and sending a commercial message to a group of people through their email. This can be done with both current customers and potential leads and is a very important part of inbound marketing. Since 90% of adults and 74% of teenagers still use email, it is a great space to utilize time with your target audience. 

How to Build an Email Campaign

The first step to any email campaign is building your targeted email list. Where do you get your list from? Simple, convert your website visitors into subscribers. Aside from having an attractive website with relevant content you can entice visitors to subscribe to your email list by using various pop ups. The use of optins on your site, when tailored well, can increase your email list immensely. You can use a welcome gate that shows up when they first enter your site, a lightbox popup that temporarily blanks out the rest of the content while they enter in their information, or an exit-intent popup which appears when they are about to leave your site. Be strategic with these optins though. Too many can annoy your visitors and cause them to abandon your site. 

Understanding your goals for your email campaign and knowing your target audience will allow for you to tailor the email to what they will respond to and help to know what type of email to use. Promotional emails typically offer sales and promotions to you customers and help to get them to your site. Relational emails are usually weekly newsletters, free content, or relevant information for your subscriber. Transactional emails confirm your customer’s subscription, welcomes them to your email list, includes order or purchase confirmations, or any changes to subscriber information. By knowing your target audience you can make sure your campaign is built to create the most impact and convert more brand loyalty, as well will allow you to segment your email list so that the content being sent to them is more likely to be opened by them and not sent to their spam folder. By segmenting your audience you can improve the click through rate on your emails up to 50%.

By segmenting your audience you can improve the click through rate on your emails up to 50%.

Planning out your emails is important for staying in communication with your subscribers. Important points to consider is email frequency, how often they should receive an email without it overwhelming them, content being sent to them and if it is relevant, and what are you trying to achieve with the emails. Oftentimes, a personalized email that includes their name and gives value to readers will be more successful. This can be done with a personal story, a poll, survey, GIF, video, things that will help keep them engaged. The email should be well designed and short, mobile friendly as many consumers use their phone to read their emails, and should include images with alt tags in order to make it appealing and to inform the subscriber what the picture is in case they have disabled images. Lastly, craft a subject line that gets your audience's attention and avoid using spam trigger words. 

Using the Technology Wisely

Having a well designed email campaign is only half of the work. You then want to test and track all of the information related to the campaign in order to measure its effectiveness and to be able to pivot when something is not working. Proper email campaigning software will allow you to test everything from design to layout, copy, subject lines, CTAs, click through rates, unsubscribes, ect. This will allow you to fix what doesn’t work and hopefully to be able to re-engage inactive subscribers. Choosing a good software to build our campaign within will make this process easier. A good software should make for easy campaign creation and automation that works well with your current programs you are using in your business. It should also offer analytics and campaign performance, help schedule transactional emails and blog driven updates, and respond quickly to customers. 

Email campaigns are a great tool to have in your belt and will only benefit your business with conversions and lead generation. Contact XPAND Creative Co. today to see how we can help you with your email campaign.

Article by Christa McCauley