If done correctly, email is one of the most effective — and most efficient — ways to reach your potential customers. But if done improperly, your email won’t stand out in a cluttered inbox, the lead will not open it, or you can even lose a subscriber. No pressure, right? Check out this stat: In 2019, there were an average 293.9 billion emails sent each day, a number which is estimated to increase to 347.3 billion by 2022!
Clearly email isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. But is your current email marketing strategy set up for success? In this blog, we’ll take a dive into what successful email marketing campaigns look like, so you’ll have a better idea of what you should be trying to achieve.
What Do Successful Email Marketing Campaigns Look Like?
You’ve probably heard of Buzzfeed. The site we turn to when we need a good laugh, want to see the latest cute cat GIF, or are looking to take a mindless quiz about what kind of cheese we are.
What you may not know about Buzzfeed is that they also happen to knock their email marketing campaigns out of the park.
Take a look at this:
It’s witty, gets the point across and holds true to Buzzfeed as a brand.
But let’s break the email down even further:
- The subject line captures your attention. It’s short, clear and extremely clickable.
- The photo is comical, again captures your attention and further explains the subject line and title.
- Though you can’t see it in the photo, the email is also mobile-friendly.
If your mission is to create successful email marketing campaigns, it’s worth taking a second look at what Buzzfeed is up to.
8 Steps to Launching Successful Email Marketing Campaigns
Now that you’ve seen what one successful email marketing campaign could look like, it’s time to create your own campaign that others will look to as an example.
Ensure your email content includes the following traits of successful message:
1. Personalization
As humans, we love when content addresses who we are as people; that is why personalization is so vital when creating successful email marketing campaigns. According to Experian, personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates. It could be as simple as using your lead’s name and signing off with your own.
We also recommend making your email content dynamic. Dynamic emails contain content that changes based on the lead’s information.
For example, let’s say a lead is interested in specific services a marketing agency provides, such as branding, website design, development, digital marketing or creative services. When a lead shows an expressed interest in one of those services, custom fields can capture said interest.
After the lead fills out a form triggering an email autoresponder, dynamic content ensures that whatever is within the email is specific to the interests of the lead opening it – even though you’ve sent the email to everyone who filled out the form.
2. Visually Appealing
When a lead opens an email, you have to keep them reading. One way to do that is through visual organization.
Use white space to your advantage. Choose an image that is engaging enough to entice your contact to feel something, but at the same time is not too aggressive. Try to avoid large chunks of text; as a rule of thumb, you should use one to two sentences per paragraph.
3. Responsive
Successful email marketing campaigns look good no matter where the viewer reads the content, but you especially want your emails to look good on mobile devices.
These days, customers demand a seamless mobile experience:
- Emails that display incorrectly are often deleted within three seconds.
- More than 70% of people read their email in a mobile app.
4. Well-Written
This one almost goes without saying. Almost.
When it comes to your marketing, content is everything. It’s what helps nurture your lead through the buyer’s journey. It’s what frequently entices a click, an action and ultimately a purchase.
Make sure your email sounds like you. You must have a purpose in your content, a story that takes contacts from start to end and ensures they are excited for more. But before your contact even gets into the body of the email, potential leads first have to like your subject line.
Here are some tips to help you with emails:
- Keep it short.
- Use actionable language.
- Be clear and concise.
- Ensure the most important words are at the beginning.
- Use words that would be searched.
5. Clear Call-to-Action
As with most marketing content you create, you want to ensure the step you intend the lead to take is obvious.
This rule holds true in your emails. With each one you produce, make sure to have one main call-to-action (CTA), whether it’s to watch a video, read a blog post or download an infographic. The lead should know exactly what you want them to do.
With that said, it’s important to note you can also include a “Contact Us” link in your sign-off, but if that is not the primary action you’d like your lead to take, it’s best practice not to put it in button format.
When it comes to the strategy surrounding your campaign, keep in mind the following steps:
6. Don’t Bombard Your Contacts
How many emails are too many emails?
When it comes to what customers prefer, the answers are all over the map. According to a MarketingSherpa survey, 61% of users prefer receiving a promotional email at least once a month, 15% wouldn’t mind receiving one every day and 91% have no issues with promotional emails.
Before cementing in the exact number of emails to send your contacts, do the following:
- Survey subscribers and see what content they’re interested in receiving.
- Increase the frequency in which you send emails slowly.
When a UK email agency incorporated the above tips in their marketing campaign, they saw:
- 48% more requested quotes.
- 304% more unique clicks.
- 45% more email revenue.
7. Timing is Everything
Understanding how many emails to send is just one aspect you need to master when it comes to launching successful email marketing campaigns. You also need to know when to send.
Moosend analyzed over 10 billion emails. Most opens occurred between 8 and 9 a.m. on a Thursday.
With that said, similar to the number of emails, when it comes to timing, you can follow the broad stats seen in the industry above. Keep monitoring your analytics, test different times and note your findings. When you find a time that works, stick to it.
8. Analyze and Revise
If you don’t measure and analyze, you can’t improve.
To ensure you have successful email marketing campaigns, you need to actually know what to look into when it comes to your analytics.
How to Measure Success in Your Email Marketing Campaign
With the right marketing automation platform, you can measure the results of your email campaigns through KPIs such as:
- Opens: A metric used in email reporting to determine how many times a specific email has been interacted with. Open rates are commonly of high interest to clients, but since an email open does not establish tracking, we urge you to focus more on clicks.
- Clicks: A metric used in email reporting to determine which links received the largest level of engagement.
- Unique open and click rates: By using unique opens and clicks as a metric, you remove the risk that your rates may be inflated by a particular recipient opening or clicking multiple times. You will gain a more objective view of how many recipients you engaged with.
- Hard bounces: Hard bounces are emails that are rejected by the recipient internet service provider (ISP) and are marked as permanently undeliverable. If you get a lot of these, you need to revise your lists.
- Soft bounces: Emails that are rejected by the recipient ISP and are marked as temporarily undeliverable.
Once you look into the analytics, review the steps above and do some A/B testing to improve them even further.
We hope you’ve learned the steps necessary to create successful email marketing campaigns. To make life easier and get you closer to accomplishing your goal, we suggest automating where possible. To learn more about marketing automation, contact us or get a demo today!
