What Makes a Successful Email Marketing Campaign?

What is Email Marketing?

When considering a successful email marketing campaign, the first question that requires answering is, ‘What is email marketing?’ Email marketing, sent to your email list, builds the awareness of your target audience to new services and products, keeping them up to date with the value of your brand. It will promote your business and keep your audience engaged between purchases. Email marketing builds brand awareness, generates website traffic and relationships and encourages customers to take action.

Why Run Email Marketing Campaigns?

It’s clear that for your business to remain competitive, you need to operate a successful email marketing campaign. Every day, billions of emails are sent and received, and receiving a personalised communication is critical to securing leads and sales.

Successful Email Marketing Strategies

A successful email marketing strategy is an important part of your marketing strategy. Follow these strategies to get you started:

• Make sure your message is personalised with customer data. Personalised emails deliver approximately six times higher transaction rates.
• Segment your subscribers to target your audience.
• Send mobile-friendly emails: email campaigns that are optimised for mobile generate a lot of revenue
• Automated email campaigns get the right message to the right people without doing the work every time.

List Building for Your Email Marketing Campaign

Your email list is a priority. Previously, companies would simply buy a list and spam an audience with their message. Now, of course, this isn’t possible and you need to find other ways to build your list:

• Include a sign-up form in as many places as possible, such as your homepage, landing pages or social media. Make sign-up forms obvious.
• Offer something in exchange for an email address, such as coupons or vouchers.
• A great way to build a list is to include social sharing and the ability for subscribers to forward your email to a friend.

How Long Should a Marketing Email Be?

An effective marketing email needs to be long enough to get your message across but not so long the reader loses interest: it should grab the attention of the reader and entice them to take action. The email should be no longer than approximately 20 lines of text or anywhere between 50 to 200 words. Anything less than 50 words wouldn’t offer enough information.

Email Marketing Campaign Call to Action

Every email marketing campaign that is sent out should adhere to a quality control process to reduce the chance of errors. They should contain a specific purpose or call to action (CTA) to make a purchase; follow a link to a blog post or social media post or whatever it is that you need targeting. Your email marketing campaign should deliver relevant content that impacts on the reader but should not be used as a standalone campaign. The majority of companies send messages to those who have signed up to receive them: this allows for higher conversion rates as they are being delivered to a target audience.

Content for Email Marketing

You have your email list and your target audience, but the message is everything. The email needs to contain images as well as text that are attractive and inviting.  However, your content needs to be straight to the point: there’s no need for fluff or fillers to pad out your content. Focus on the message you want to get across to make the experience richer and more beneficial for the reader. Provide links that offer more information. Personalisation doesn’t just end with your customer’s name at the head of the email, it should look like a personal communication for it to perform to its full potential.

Mobile-Friendly Content

According to Statista, a German company who specialises in marketing and consumer data, the number of smartphone subscriptions worldwide has surpassed six billion. Additionally, it is forecast to grow further by several hundred million over the next few years and 47% of emails are opened on a mobile device. Therefore, making content mobile friendly is key to successful email marketing:

• One column template
• Increased font size
• Follow iOS guidelines of 44 pixels wides by 44 pixels tall
• Have obvious ‘call to actions’ that are easily accessible
• Keep tappable elements towards the centre of the screen

Use Email Marketing Companies to Create Your Successful Campaign

Outsourcing to email marketing companies provides an affordable solution to optimise your output. If you don’t have the time to build automated emails, segment your lists, or analyse your metrics, then try outsourcing to email marketing companies, such as us here at Romax. We have a variety of skills that include:

• Content writing
• Graphic design
• Coding
• Data analysis
• A/B Testing which lets you test two different versions of your email by sending each one to a small percentage of your audience.
• Marketing strategy

Email marketing is here to stay and if you’re not doing it, you’re missing out on an important marketing opportunity. So, hopefully we have answered the question, “What is email marketing?” To create your first email marketing campaign, get in touch with us here at Romax and we’ll be happy to help you on your way.