Email campaigns are one of the most powerful tools for small businesses to connect with customers and drive awareness, leads, and sales.
Yet some businesses still approach email marketing with “email blasts” – sending a single generic message to all subscribers.
If you’re still relying on this ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, you’re potentially missing out on the true power, and the optimum return on investment from your email campaigns.
While sending a single message to all subscribers has its place, you’re often able to achieve better results with a more strategic approach to email marketing – delivering a planned series of emails to a specific audience, designed to achieve a particular business objective.
In this article, we’ll share some top tips to create a winning email marketing campaign.
The benefits of approaching your email marketing strategically
Taking a strategic approach to your email campaigns offers several advantages over simple “email blasts”.
Here’s why planning your group email efforts strategically can significantly improve your results:
Consistent brand messaging
By planning your email campaigns in advance, you can have more control over the consistency of your messaging and design elements.
Having this consistency can help reinforce your branding with subscribers, and helps build brand recognition.
Improved subscriber experience
A well-planned series of emails can provide a better experience for your subscribers.
Instead of receiving disjointed messages, they get a tailored series of carefully planned content that better meets their needs.
Effective lead nurturing
Taking a strategic approach to your email campaigns allows you to guide prospects through the buying process.
Each email can address specific stages of the customer journey, building trust with new subscribers who may not be familiar with your brand, until they are ready to buy.
More effective resource planning
Planning your email marketing campaign strategy in advance helps you manage your internal resources more efficiently, avoiding any last-minute rushes.
Higher conversion rates
By taking the time to craft tailored email flows for different segments of your email list, you’re able to achieve higher engagement and conversion rates compared to generic email blasts, leading to more leads and sales.
The key steps to creating a winning email campaign
There is clearly a wide range of benefits to adopting a strategic approach to your group email marketing.
But creating an effective email campaign doesn’t happen by accident.
To deliver a successful campaign, it’s important to follow six crucial steps:
1. Define your goals and target audience
For an email campaign to be successful, it must have clearly defined goals and a clear understanding of its target audience.
The decisions you make when you’re setting your goals and objectives will have a significant influence on the other areas of your campaign strategy, so it’s important to take the time to get this stage right.
As an illustration, if you decide you want to raise awareness of a new product – the approach you take to your emails will differ from a sales-focused campaign for a well-known product or service.
When you’re setting up your campaign goals and objectives, a good framework to use is SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound).
For example, rather than setting a goal to “increase sales from emails”, you might make it SMART by saying “boost revenue for a specific product by 15% over the next 30 days, targeting any subscriber that has browsed a certain section of the site, through a series of targeted emails”.
Another important aspect of this early planning stage is to make sure you really understand your audience, their motivations, pain points, and how your products and services can make a difference. This can really help you tailor your messaging.
It can be tempting to rely on assumptions about your audience, but if you have customer data, survey results, previous purchase behavior, and even customer service emails, you can really help take a data-driven approach to your email campaign strategy.
Once you have a broad understanding of your target audience’s needs and motivations, it’s time to move on to the next step—segmenting your list more granularly.
2. Segment your email list
Email list segmentation allows you to tailor your messages more precisely, leading to better engagement, and ultimately – stronger email campaign results.
To illustrate this with an example, imagine you’re setting up an email campaign to promote a new year, running apparel and accessories sale.
As part of the objective setting and audience understanding stage, you’ve already identified that your target audience includes any logged-in user who has spent time browsing the ’running’ section of your site in the last 60 days.
This is a good start, but it can be refined even more.
You might start by considering segmenting your list by gender, promoting women’s clothing and accessories to a female audience, and men’s items to a male audience.
By taking this approach to segmentation, you immediately make your emails more relevant to each group of subscribers, increasing the likelihood they’ll engage with your content.
But you don’t have to stop there.
You could further segment each audience based on the value of their previous purchases, including higher-end products to serious runners who regularly purchase premium items, and more affordable products to those who purchase budget items.
You can see how granular you could go with segmentation if you wanted to, but the big consideration to bear in mind is that the more detailed and specific you go, the more resources are likely to be needed to tailor your emails. So it’s really a balancing act.
To implement segmentation effectively, it’s important to find an email list platform that has granular segmentation capabilities. It can often save a lot of time if you choose an email platform that is able to sync with your CRM and other internal tools, making sure your segments are always based on the most up-to-date customer data.
However – if you’re syncing with your CRM, it’s worth making sure that you only import subscribers that have opted in to receive marketing communications, to make sure you comply with data privacy regulations when sending your emails.
3. Plan your email flow
When you start planning the email campaign for each of your segments, it can often be helpful to think of it as a journey for your subscribers.
If you carefully craft the sequence of emails in your campaign, you can create a logical flow that guides your audience towards your campaign goals in a way that feels natural and engaging – building interest at first, then providing value, before ultimately driving conversions.
If we continue with the example of the New Year’s running campaign, your first email might highlight the importance of choosing the right running shoes, discussing how the right footwear can improve performance and prevent injuries and subtly introducing your range of running trainers. Your second email might focus on base layers, explaining how they can help regulate body temperature and improve your comfort during runs – before subtly introducing your selection of high-performance base layers.
You might continue like this, with different emails introducing the benefits of breathable outerwear, reflective clothing, torches, and running lights before a final email reminding subscribers that your New Year’s running sale ends soon.
By structuring your email campaign this way, you can introduce your variety of running products while providing valuable information to your subscribers.
This approach helps maintain interest throughout the campaign and increases the likelihood that subscribers will respond positively – potentially buying throughout the series, or when they are reminded of your sale at the end of the sequence.
Every business and email objective is different, and this example sequence wouldn’t be right for everybody.
But when you come to build your own email flow, remember the aim is to create a cohesive narrative that builds towards your campaign objectives.
Each email should feel like a natural progression from the last, with a clear thread connecting the entire series.
By treating your email campaign as a carefully crafted journey, you can create a more engaging and effective experience for your subscribers, ultimately leading to better results for your group email marketing efforts.
4. Craft compelling group email content
Once you’ve got your email flow all planned, the next step to secure the success of your email campaign is creating high-quality content.
There are a number of different elements you need to consider when building a successful email.
First, you need to pay attention to your subject line, which has a significant impact on your email’s open rate.
With the average person receiving more than 100 emails every day, it’s important that your subject line captures the attention of subscribers, and encourages them to open to read more.
We’ve put together a comprehensive guide with 8 tips to help you achieve subject line success, but as a top-level summary, you’ll want to keep it below 70 characters, use action-oriented language, personalize emails with subscribers’ names, and carefully consider the inclusion of emojis.
Once subscribers open your email, the content needs to deliver on the promise of your subject line.
This is where the importance of HTML emails comes in, as they allow you to create engaging content that includes images, different fonts, and layouts. Simplelists has full support for HTML emails, and if you’re new to them, our guide on sending HTML emails can help you get started.
The content you include in each of your group emails should relate to the needs, pain points, and motivations of your target audience – which you identified in the first step of defining your goals and target audience.
The more relevant your content is to each subscriber, the more likely they are to engage with your emails. By tailoring your message to specific segments of your email list, you can create highly relevant emails that resonate with each group.
As you craft your email content, keep in mind the email flow you planned in step three. Each email should build on the previous one, creating a cohesive narrative that guides your subscribers toward your campaign goals.
Additionally, every email you create in your flow should include a strong call to action (CTA). Your CTA tells the reader exactly what you want them to do next – whether that’s making a purchase, signing up for an event, or simply clicking through to learn more.
If you want to find out more about how to create a strong email CTA, take a look at our guide on email CTA best practices.
5. Ensure your emails are mobile-friendly
With more than half of all emails currently being opened on mobile devices, it’s crucial to ensure that every email in your campaign displays correctly on mobiles.
If your email doesn’t display correctly on a smartphone, it can lead to frustration, decreased engagement, and even unsubscribes from a significant proportion of your audience.
So, what do you need to do to make your emails mobile-friendly?
A lot of businesses address this with responsive design, which automatically adjusts the email layout based on the screen size of the device being used to view your email.
When you’re looking at designing the mobile version of your group email, there are some key considerations to help optimize it for success:
-
Simplify your layout
Use a single-column design that’s easy to scroll through on a small screen. -
Increase your font size
Make sure your text is large enough to read on a mobile device without zooming. -
Make buttons touch-friendly
Your call-to-action buttons should be large enough to tap easily with a finger. -
Optimize images
Use compressed images with smaller file sizes that load quickly on mobile networks. -
Test across devices
Before sending, preview your email on various devices and email clients to ensure consistency.
6. Test and track your results
The final step in running a successful email campaign is to test your emails and track your results.
Before hitting ’send’ on any campaign email, it’s important to preview and test-send your messages to help ensure that your emails display correctly across different email clients and devices.
What looks perfect in your email editor might display differently in Gmail, Outlook, or on a smartphone. Tools like Litmus can be useful for this testing process, allowing you to preview your emails across a wide range of email clients and devices quickly and easily.
Once your campaign is live, it’s crucial to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) for each email you send.
These typically include:
- Open rates: The percentage of subscribers who open your email.
- Click-through rates: The percentage of subscribers who click on a link within your email.
- Conversion rates: The percentage of subscribers who complete your desired action.
By tracking these metrics, you gain valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t in your email campaigns.
For example, a high open rate but a low click-through rate might suggest that your subject lines are effective, but your email content or call-to-action needs improvement.
Once you’ve reviewed your KPIs, it’s good practice to make iterative changes to your future emails by using A/B tests.
A/B tests involve creating two versions of an email that differ in one specific area, such as the subject line, email copy, layout, or call-to-action button. You then send these variants to an equal proportion of your email list and analyze which performs the best.
By consistently testing and tracking your results, you’re able to continuously improve your email marketing campaign strategy.
Over time, you’ll develop a deeper understanding of what resonates with your audience, enabling you to craft more effective emails and achieve better results from your email campaigns.
Simplelists: Making group email marketing campaigns easy
There’s a lot that goes into creating a winning email campaign – defining your goals and audience, segmenting your email list, planning your email flow, crafting compelling content, ensuring mobile-friendliness, and continuously testing and tracking your results.
You don’t necessarily want to make the process even more complicated by navigating the steep learning curve of a premium email marketing platform, which is overflowing with features and functionality that many businesses never use.
This is why a lot of businesses choose Simplelists.
With granular segmentation capabilities, support for HTML emails, and the ability to include personalization in your emails – Simplelists includes everything that you need to deliver winning group email marketing campaigns and nothing that you don’t.
And with the recent ability to sync with internal CRM systems and other business tools, you can have peace of mind that Simplelists is always working from your latest subscriber data.
Ready to take your email campaigns to the next level?