In this section, we are going to take a look at the key elements involved in structuring an email marketing campaign and maximising it’s success by carrying out supporting activities.
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Who to Send it to
The first stage of any campaign is to decide who to send your email marketing to. It’s well worth taking the time to build your own database of opted in subscribers. Often the temptation is to buy a large list of email addresses, as a marketing form, this really doesn’t work, so it’s definitely best avoided, these unqualified lists of random addresses can often cause more harm that good.
As your campaign of email marketing sends progresses, you can also start to segment your data based on the different ways that people have engaged with your sends.
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What to Send
The key here is to try different types of design and see which works the best for your target audience. It may be that it’s best to try a sequence of different type of email marketing design.Some campaigns have lots of success with mixing a well designed HTML sales offer type email, with a formal letter type. If these are sent at regular intervals, alternating between the two email design types, then this can work really well.
One of the frequently made mistakes as part of an email marketing campaign is to keep sending the same design. If your design worked really well on the first send, then the temptation is to then send it again, assuming that the good results of the first send will be repeated.
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How frequently to send
This can often be a tough one to get right - how frequently does your recipient want to see you mailer inside their inbox?
It really varies from business to business and/or how frequently you have new information or products to share with your email marketing subscribers. If your business has a very fast stock turnover, then it may be ok to send everyday, if you have fresh content to offer every day.
For most businesses, send email marketing every two weeks seems to offer a good balance between sending enough to remain on your viewer’s radar and not too much that it becomes too frequent.
It’s worth keeping a close on on your campaign analytics to gauge how frequently your email subscribers want to receive emails from you. If your viewers feel that your emails are too frequent then they will start to unsubscribe. So, it’s worth keeping a close eye on the amount on unsubscribes when you are trying different time gaps between your email marketing.
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Using social media to spread your reach
Social media is a great tool to use alongside your email marketing campaigns, the two marketing methods compliment each other very well.
When you send out your email marketing, it’s worth putting links to all of your social media feeds either at the top , or at the bottom. By including your social media links it gives viewers the opportunity to learn more about your company in the more informal setting of a social media feed. Social media can be used to let people know about the culture and ethos of your company, this really helps to build that all important trust factor with your email marketing subscribers.
You can also post a copy of your email marketing to your social media feeds, this really helps to lengthen the reach of your email marketing. It’s a great way of converting your social media followers into email subscribers; if they like your content, they will join your mailing list.
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Analysing your stats
Your email marketing software will have a suite of campaign analytics, this will give you access to lots of really powerful information to help you fine tune your future sends.
Analytics will tell you how many of your emails were successfully delivered, how many failed, clicks, reads and unsubscribes. This information is really handy to have, by looking for trends in your opens, clicks and unsubscribes you can tweak different elements of your design accordingly.
You can use analytics to look at the results of a split test. As we’ve discussed earlier, split testing involves sending a different email marketing template to small sections of your database and observing the results through analytics.
The depth of information available via your email marketing analytics means that you can look at so much more than the number of opens and clicks etc. For all of this data you can also see the times of the interactions from each user and the geographic location of each subscriber. So you can see trends in the average time of day that people open your email and where abouts in the world they are based.
Having access to this depth of information is an extremely powerful tool to have at your disposal. By looking at this data, you can fine tune your email marketing for peak performance
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Follow up activity
The success of any email marketing campaign can be significantly boosted if the initial contact is followed up. After looking at your campaign analytics, you can build sub lists of people who either did or did not open your mailer.
With this information you can follow these sub groups up with a secondary campaign that is based on the way that they engaged (or didn’t engage) with the email marketing send.
