How to Start a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

In 2016, $44 were made for every $1 spent on email marketing campaigns on average. That’s an incredible 4400% ROI. For what it costs, email marketing is one of the most profitable forms of digital marketing available to businesses today. However, there are certain tips and tricks to make sure your email campaign is as effective as possible. Here are some things you need to start doing to get email marketing campaign off the ground.

Start Collecting Emails

First things first, you can’t do any email marketing if you aren’t collecting email addresses from potential and current customers. If you haven’t already, create a newsletter signup area on your website and social media pages. Don’t overwhelm people by asking them to provide a bunch of information. Simply ask them to give their name and email address.

It’s also a good idea to be upfront about how you will be using your mailing list. State how frequently you’ll be sending messages (monthly, weekly, daily) and offer some sort of incentive for joining your mailing list. For example, many businesses will offer exclusive discounts to their mailing lists that aren’t available to the general public.

By showing the advantages of being a part of your mailing list and making signing up as simple as possible, you’ll be able to start building your audience.

Segment Your List

Email marketing offers the ability to send targeted messages to your audience, so don’t get in the habit of sending the same email to everyone. In order to send targeted messages, you need to gather information that shows how to best segment your lists. Most email marketing services offer the ability to send out surveys which are a great way to get your mailing list to segment itself.

Create a simple survey that can be completed in under a few minutes. In the past, I’ve created surveys that ask recipients to rank how likely they are to make a purchase in the near future within a variety of product categories. I then asked recipients to mark the groups of items they are looking to purchase. I then used the results to segment audiences into groups based on their purchase desires. Then, I sent those lists highly targeted offers and discounts.  

Edit and Test Your Emails Before Sending Them

Now that you’ve collected emails, and segmented your list, it’s time to create some killer newsletters. Once you’ve crafted the perfect newsletter, you MUST edit and test it before sending it. It’s a terrible feeling to send out an email blast and notice immediately after that it contains an embarrassing typo or a bad link. If you don’t have great writing skills, you might want to consider in investing in some copywriting.

You should also send test emails that you open on both a desktop and a mobile device. The percentage of people that see your emails will depend on your audience, but it’s possible that as many as two-thirds will open your email on their phone. If your newsletter isn’t readable on a mobile device, you can lose a lot of potential conversions.

Follow these basic tips, and you’ll quickly be on your way to driving revenue for your business through email. If you ever have questions or want to outsource your email marketing, contact Ruby Porter.