The Most Effective Guide to Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing nowadays is all about having one-to-one conversations with your subscribers. While you can send an email using any free email platform such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail, this can bring problems regarding the disabling of some features in these platforms. Also, it doesn’t look professional, and sending bulk mails from free-to-use email services can flag your emails as SPAM.

Having one-to-one conversations with subscribers is especially difficult to manage when you have a huge subscriber base and all of your subscribers are at different stages of the sales funnel. So, email marketers make use of different tools while sending out email campaigns. Here are minimum email tools required for effortlessly setting your email campaigns:

Email Service Provider

For sending out any email, you need to have an Email Service Provider (ESP). An ESP is a Swiss army knife that offers you the provision of sending HTML email templates to a mailing list along with multiple features. Email service providers reserve a range of whitelisted Internet Portal (IP) addresses through which you can send your emails. A bare minimum ESP should have:

Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, MoonMail and HubSpot are a few examples of ESPs.

Lead Capture Tools

As we stated earlier, in order to send an email to your subscribers you need to collect the email addresses of leads. For that, you need lead capture tools. Lead capture tools are basically forms which collect the email addresses of your leads. There are two types of Lead Capture tools:

• Those which ‘pop’ out and offer some incentive to the visitors in exchange for filling out a form, when they satisfy certain criteria.
• Static forms on landing pages that the subscriber can fill out when they land.

Hello Bar, OptinMonster, Leadin by Hubspot, SumoMe and Lead Pages are a few examples of Lead Capture tools.

Landing Page Builder

Daniel Burstein (Senior Director at MECLABs) states that “Email is the bridge between two landing pages”. So, before executing an email campaign, it is important to create a relevant landing page which mirrors the message conveyed in the email. Most ESPs provide in-built landing page builders. You can also find ad-hoc landing page building tools on the web, with which you can create stellar landing pages.

Unbounce, Instapage, Wishpond and Crazy Egg are a few examples of landing page builder tools.

Back-end CRM

This is the brain behind the entire email campaign (after you, obviously). CRM manages the interconnectivity between all your tools and processes all the data collected from each tool. For example, when a visitor fills out a form, CRM stores the email address and ‘informs’ the ESP to send a welcome email to the email address.

Salesforce Sales Cloud, Zoho and Infusionsoft are a few examples of CRM tools.

Building your email list

So, we’ve gone through the pre-requisites that you need to complete before you take up the responsibility of handling email campaigns. At this point, we assume that you have:

• A concrete goal decided for your email campaign
• Created a strategy to achieve that goal
• Created a rough email marketing calendar
• All the required tools setup and interacting with each other

Now, we move to the next stage of executing your email campaigns…

The backbone of any email campaign is the set of emails you send. While B2B industry relies heavily on plain text emails for marketing, there are situations in which HTML emails are indispensable. Therefore, it is important to have several certain types of email templates in your arsenal, irrespective of whether you are part of the B2B or the B2C industry.

For those in the e-commerce industry, there are some additional email series you need to include in your set of emails:

Cart Abandonment Series. Coax your customer into coming back and going through the checkout.

Transactional emails Series (Order receipt, upsell, cross-sell, shipping notification)

In addition to the above emails, you have to include other emails which match the goal of your email campaign. Once you have decided on the kind of emails you will include in your email campaign, it is time to move forward to having those templates designed. We go into email customer journeys in more detail below.

Now that you have all the email templates ready for dispersal, it is time to set up email automation. This will cut down the effort you need to expend considerably cut down, and ensure that your emails are timely, personalized and hyper-relevant to the reader. Email automations send specific emails to your subscribers when they satisfy the behavior trigger. These can be used for sending emails for repetitive tasks such as subscriber signup, post-purchase review, birthday / anniversary wishes, appointment reminders, etc. without user intervention.

Email automation series are a great way to nurture your leads, keep them updated with your brand & industry and schedule your email campaigns. Let’s see how email automation can help you to manage different email campaigns.

• The Problem email

  This is the first email in the series and will focus on the problems or shortcomings of the current situation.

• The Product Introduction email

  This email will introduce the different products and services that your brand offers, while referencing how they will help the prospect to achieve their goals.

• The Value Addition email

  This email will demonstrate how your product will add value to your subscriber and guide them on how to use it.

• The Transition email

  This email will highlight how easy it will be for the subscriber to make the switch from their current choices to your products.

• The Trust Building email

  This email will feature a case study or testimonials from your existing customers to help build trust around your brand.

• The Resources email

  This email is more of an educational email featuring eBooks, blogs, templates, checklist, models, etc. for the subscriber to learn more about your product.

At the end of the series, it is assumed that your subscriber is capable enough to make a purchase. We suggest that you offer discounts to encourage them to make the jump.

---

Other trigger-based emails

Other email automation series that you can set up are transactional emails and re-engagement emails. Transactional emails are a series of emails sent to a customer on successful purchase such as order receipt, shipping details, order tracking emails, subscription renewal emails etc. They are not restricted to ecommerce since every industry has the end goal of customers making a purchase.

Earlier discussed in the list cleaning segment, re-engagement emails are another set of triggered emails, but the difference is that these emails are triggered when there is no user interaction for a long time.

Pump the brakes! There is one more small step to take before tasking your email designer with designing the email template. You will need to keep your branding guidelines and brand assets ready for design. Our email development team at Uplers always refers the branding guidelines while designing an email for our 6500+ clients.

Brand assets are different design elements such as the logo, color schemes, fonts, copy tone etc. that define your business as a brand. A brand guideline is a document that instructs when and where the branding assets can be used. They help to maintain consistency across designs by demonstrating what a brand looks, feels and sounds like. Together, both create the brand identity that speaks about the mission, vision, audience, personality and values of the business.

Building Your Email (Content)

While the email templates are being designed and coded, let’s move our attention to the next important part of an email template – email copy. Your email copy and design need to go hand-in- hand in order to effectively engage with your subscribers. Email copy motivates the subscriber to take action, while the design draws attention to the email copy. So, it is important to put as much emphasis on email copy as much as you do on email design.

The email copy can be categorized into three major parts:

• Subject Line / Preheader Text

  This is the first point of contact for your email to interact with your subscribers. Your subject line and pre-header text combo needs to hint at what the subscriber can expect to find inside just enough to raise their curiosity. 80% of email opens depend on your subject line.

  

• Introductory Copy

  This is the content that would be displayed above the fold and have a strong link to the subject line to keep the readers interested. This is a key area for your email content, as it might be the only area your subscribers read, and it needs to engage them quickly to keep them reading.

• Body Copy

  The hook of the subject line needs to be answered here. This is main body of the email and the job of the body copy is to provide necessary information to guide the subscriber towards the final goal of your email campaign. The email copy needs to be created in such a way that your subscribers are tempted to click through your email and reach the dedicated landing page.

• CTA

  The CTA or the acid test of your email copy is testament to the effectiveness of your content. Yet, never consider the CTA button and the body copy to be two separate entities. The actionable CTA copy should be synergic to what was covered in the body copy in order to have your subscribers make the connection. Also consider the CTA from a reader’s point of view where they will be asking what’s in it for them, and what’s the value of clicking this CTA. If it isn’t clear what you want the reader to do, you’ll lose out on valuable actions being taken.

  Your CTA can also be broken down into primary and secondary categories. The primary CTA will be the main one in the email content, the key button you want your readers to click. The secondary CTA is to complement and support the primary CTA.

  Closing of the email – what’s the closing content of your email? What’s the key summary or the final message you want to share with your readers? This could be a personal sign off or a CTA reinforcing the action you want a subscriber to take.

A landing page is a separate entity from your website and needs to have following elements to be considered a landing page.

• Attention Stealer Headline
• Captivating GIF/ Image slideshow
• Relatable Sub-Headline
• Call-to-action (CTA)
• Compelling Copy
• Testimonials/ Social Proofs
• Image/Video Supporting the Copy
• Lead Generating Opt-in Form

• Clear Singular Objective

  Any unnecessary navigation can result in your visitors getting bounced or directed to some other page. This will defeat the purpose of creating the landing page.

• Separate landing page for each campaign

  Whether you are collecting email address for a downloadable lead magnet or for email subscriptions, each landing page should be separate for each different campaign. This gives you enough subscriber segregation to target with different personalization.

• Complete the conversation

  Your email copy won’t be able to convey everything that you aimed while setting the goal. This is where the importance of the landing page needs to shine across. For lead generation pages, the conversation should highlight the advantages the subscribers get on subscribing. For click-through landing pages, the message should focus on explaining the action hinted in the email copy.

  Looking for landing page services? Uplers can help you out.

  Learn more

---

A/B Testing Elements

While you may have a finger on the pulse of what the subscribers want, you cannot accurately predict what works for them and what doesn’t. At such crucial moments, testing two variants of same email element can help you to understand better. This is why A/B testing your email is important.

The concept behind A/B testing your email campaigns involves creating two identical email campaigns with only one email element different. The campaigns are sent to two different portions of your subscriber lists and the winning email is sent to the rest. The email elements that can be checked on A/B testing are:

• Subject Lines
• Email Copy
• Email Layout
• Images or Any Other Visual Element
• CTA Placement
• Email Length

Always conduct an A/B test based on a hypothesis instead of eyeballing the results. Also, the split should ideally be 15-15-70 or at least 25-25-50 in order to get accurate results.

It is time to test the effectiveness of your efforts. As we stated at the beginning of the article, the cumulative result of an email campaign when compared with the Key Performance Indicators reveals how effective the email campaign was in achieving its goals. Yet, measuring the campaign performance is not the end of an email campaign and every email campaign has scope for improvement.

---