Here’s Why You Need an Email Campaign Manager: 7 Reasons You Can’t Ignore!

 In modern times, plenty of online real estate has already been dedicated to extolling the (many) virtues of email marketing.

It is an excellent and cost-effective tool for lead nurturing, marketing, customer communication, and relationship management. It can improve sales and is a great way to keep a pulse on customer experience.

However…

There’s a lot more to email marketing than most people realize, and it can get complicated as you scale up your game. Often, many brands struggle with issues like “siloed” data, below-par deliverability, difficulties with audience segmentation, content personalization or post-campaign analytics, and an inability to integrate email marketing into cross-channel experience management.

Here’s where a professional and dedicated email campaign manager can be a real game-changer.

Here are 7 ways to take your email marketing from good to great – with an email campaign manager!

1. Plan email campaign strategy

Planning, executing, controlling, and measuring a campaign requires significant forethought, judgment, and effort. This is why you need a well-planned marketing strategy that clearly establishes campaign goals and lays out the roadmap to achieve them. This can be overwhelming, but an email campaign manager can help minimize the grief and guide your team towards success.

They will design a strategy that encompasses every aspect of your email campaign, including:

• Selecting the right tools
• Identifying the relevant target audience and setting goals for each
• Brainstorming tactics to get audience sign-ups
• Segmenting your email subscriber list
• Choosing the right email type
• Creating automated drip campaigns (where applicable)
• Determining send times and frequencies
• Developing a content strategy: determine the content type, style, tone, personalization level, and accessibility considerations
• Setting up A/B testing: determine test elements, audience, timings, and metrics

2. Clarify each campaign’s goals

All good marketing – including email marketing – always starts with setting goals. What do you want to achieve with a particular campaign?

• Welcome new subscribers and start to build a relationship with them
• Stay connected with customers by providing something they’ll value
• Provide information about a new product or service
• Invite them to an event or online webinar to build your brand’s presence
• Boost engagement by encouraging them to download a resource, e.g. a whitepaper or report
• Persuade cart abandoners to complete incomplete transactions (and thus boost your sales)
• Re-engage existing disengaged subscribers
• Drive more traffic to a landing page or store

The campaign manager will set the right goal, and accordingly, plan and execute the right campaign. They will also be able to implement the right Call to Action (CTA) as per this goal, so the audience knows what action they need to take.

3. Deploy the right emails

Here are the three key email types you can send according to your campaign’s goals:

i. Promotional emails

Promotional emails are usually timed and sent strategically to groups of contacts.

Source

To get them right, it’s important to maintain a balance between “sales-y” and “subscriber value”, and also:

• Get a complete view of the entire customer journey
• Track the customer experience and extract actionable insights
• Use the right assets: templates, content blocks, copy and graphical elements that are most likely to resonate with recipients

Personalization is also critical to ensure that any offers or discounts are relevant to that subscriber based on their unique demographics, or prior interaction/purchase history. An email campaign manager can de-mystify these aspects and boost the performance of your promotional emails.

ii. Relational emails

The probability of successfully selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, and just 5-20% for a new customer. (Source: Altfeld & smallbizgenius.net)

This is where relational emails are super-important. Successful relationship marketing with email requires that you:

• Map customer journeys with timelines and touchpoints, all the way from initial contact to conversion
• Create customer personas and craft a story that’s most likely to appeal to them
• Target them through the right segmentation
• Win their hearts and build trust with great “human” content
• Create mobile-optimized and plain-text emails to build relationships with all customers

Source

However, they involve long-term planning, focus, and a deep understanding of customers’ needs, goals, and pain points – aspects that a campaign manager can easily manage.

iii. Transactional emails

Transactional emails facilitate one-to-one interactions to complete a transaction initiated by a customer or subscriber. Examples include registration confirmations, welcome emails, order confirmations, password change requests, etc.

Source

These emails may appear simpler than promotional and relational emails, but it can be tricky to get them right. For one, they are often time-critical. Also, they must have a key takeaway that’s immediately clear to the recipient. Finally, they must be personalized and relevant to that recipient. Without an email campaign manager, you might struggle to get these aspects right.

4. Know your audience and build a targeted subscriber list

Every successful email campaign starts with an email list of qualified leads that are interested in what you have to offer. And to build this list, audience segmentation is critical.

Segmentation will enable you to understand the needs of a specific customer base. It will also fuel your strategies related to targeting, design, content, personalization, and even testing. When you get these aspects right, you can create impressive campaigns that generate more sales, increase customer retention, and create brand advocates and superfans. A professional email campaign manager can help you realize these benefits faster and at a low cost.

An email campaign manager will know exactly which kind of email to send to which segment of the audience, such as:

1. New Users: Welcome Emails

Source

2. Converted Users: Product upsells

Source

3. Loyal Customers: Special Offers and Referral Emails

Source

4. Active Customers: Abandoned Cart Emails and Limited Time Offers

Source

Source

5. Leverage the right technology

Many tools and technologies are available that can support you to:

• Create and automate email campaigns tailored for each segment
• Leverage already existing data (e.g. in your organization’s CRM) to build your subscriber list
• Segment your audience based on demographics, needs, campaign goals, etc.
• Design layouts, copy, and graphics with easy-to-use templates, content blocks, and workflows
• Identify the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and success metrics for each campaign
• Remove spammy content and increase email deliverability
• Test campaigns before final sends to ensure that copy and design are optimized

But even with these tools, you need the right people to manage email schedules, ask customers for feedback through forms and surveys, manage unsubscribe (and other) requests, and ensure continuous improvement. These are all good ways to build success with email marketing, and for this, you need an email campaign manager.

6. “Project manage” email campaigns

Every email project needs a project manager aka a campaign manager to plan activities, identify resource requirements, mitigate risks, and manage constraints like time, scope, and cost. This person will also take accountability for end-to-end campaign execution.

Once you know your campaign goals, email type, and audience, the campaign manager will:

• Design the email campaign’s strategy and identify the relevant email type(s) that align with that strategy
• Create a schedule with email frequency and send times
• Plan copy and decide the extent of personalization
• Help create clear and relevant CTAs for each email type
• Work with the team to select the right email template, relevant design elements, and layout
• Ensure that the email adheres to brand guidelines (colors, font selections, etc.)
• Create emails that are accessible to all subscribers, including those with visual or other disabilities

They will ensure that your emails are timely, relevant, interesting, on-brand, and valuable to each subscriber. Without them, you may end up sending emails to the wrong segment or at the wrong time. You risk overwhelming them with too many emails, or your emails may include spammy words that affect deliverability and increase spam complaints. You may mistakenly assume that A/B testing is a waste of time, and you may not be compliant with laws and regulations (e.g. GDPR and CAN-SPAM) that require email marketers to respect the privacy of subscribers. These are all essential aspects that a campaign manager can help you manage and de-risk.

7. Analyze email performance

A campaign manager’s role doesn’t end with campaign deployment. For one, they leverage their advanced analytics skills to analyze campaign performance and compare it to KPIs and success metrics identified earlier. This is a critical contribution because email marketing is not a one-time-only, set-it-and-forget-it effort.

At the least, they will analyze statistics like:

• Open rates
• Click-through rates
• Conversions
• A/B test results
• Bounces
• Spam complaints

They will extract and review the ESP platform’s reports to dig deeper into this data in order to identify gaps and improvement areas. If required, they will also analyze individual emails for a more granular view of performance. These details can help you adjust your email marketing strategy, design, or copy to improve future campaigns, and make better, data-driven decisions.

---

Wrap up

Your current email marketing may not be broken. But this doesn’t mean that it cannot be better or even great. Despite a plethora of tools now available, email marketing is not effortless because these tools don’t have the capacity for intelligence, judgment, or decision-making that can truly impact the success (or failure) of your email campaigns. And this is why an email campaign manager is such an invaluable asset to your email marketing program.

Email Uplers offers world-class end-to-end email campaign management services at a 99.98% error-free rate. Dedicated resources, fast onboarding, and no long-term contracts – with Email Uplers, you get all this and more. Get started here.