INGREDIENTS OF SUCCESSFUL EMAIL MARKETING CAMPAIGN
Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations. Email marketing strategies commonly seek to achieve one or more of three primary objectives, to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness.
The term usually refers to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a merchant's relationship with current or previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.
Below are four categories of email marketing:
➢ INFORMATION EMAILS
These are focused on a specific offer, such as an upcoming sale or event or a new product announcement. Include a clear and easily identified CTA that will lead the reader to a dedicated landing page for that offer.
➢ DIGITAL NEWSLETTER
These are sent regularly, maybe weekly or monthly, and they typically include a summary of recently created content. You can make your newsletter visually appealing by including an image with each title or description. Simple is best.
➢ PRODUCT UPDATE
These emails are to alert your customers about a new product or an update to an existing product. Keep these simple and straightforward.
➢ TRANSACTIONAL EMAILS
While the emails above would be sent to large groups, transactional emails are sent to one person at a time based on an action.
Purchase confirmation emails assure the customer that their order has been received and is being processed.
Another type of transactional email is a Welcome Email. These are sent when you sign up for a website or service and usually include information about how to get the most out of your account.
Below are six (6) basic and vital ingredients for successful email marketing:
1. Know Your Subscriber – Start with an Objective
The foundation of human psychology is incentive-based behavior. “How shall I be benefitted?” is the question asked by a prospect willing to share their email address with
you and “How shall this email campaign be helpful for my brand?” should be the question you need to ask while planning your email marketing campaign.
Based on what your industry or brand offers, you need to zero down on the purpose of sending emails to your subscribers. Is your newsletter with industry updates or a catalog of your new seasonal fashion collection promising enough for someone to subscribe? Finalizing your objective also helps in the lead generation methods. Based on your objectives you can create capture forms on your page with appropriate incentives.
2. List Segmentation
You can’t simply blast an email to everyone in your list. It’s a practice that’s now obsolete, stale and irrelevant.
This means we can’t send every email to everybody. We have to segment the list of recipients. Segmentation is the key of any email marketing campaign and helps to sort the recipient list on the basis of multiple matrices. With segmentation, you can ensure tailored, personalized relevant emails to the right people at the right time.
You might segment your list by:
Gender/Age
Location
Buying preferences
Purchase history
Interests
Favorites
The most important benefit of segmentation is that it makes you able to improve opens and reads. Along with that it also improves engagement and accelerates conversion rate.
3. Welcome Emails
As soon you start getting subscribers, you must greet them with welcome emails. Welcome emails can help you set the tone of your further communication. It’s recommended to greet them with different welcome mails. The purpose of these emails would be to thanking them for subscribing and engaging them with relevant offers.
Once the person signs up, send him/her a thank you email. The next day mail can be marked to brief him about what you are offering and other soft pitches. Later on you can send an email to request him information, insights or asking them to take an action. Don’t forget to add a bit of customization to your emails and keep them quite informal.
4 Subject Lines
The importance of a terrific subject line cannot be stressed enough-it's literally the first thing users read and their first "personal" impression of your brand. An effective subject line sparks interest and builds anticipation of the email's content. You need just enough to get the user intrigued, while still staying true to your brand in under 50 characters. It's okay to think a little outside the box and let some creativity flow with subject lines, but keep in mind that simplicity usually works best. The best subject lines find a happy medium between oozing creativity and being straight to the point of why you're emailing a user while keeping the brand image in mind. The goal of a subject line is to entice recipients to open the message, and to click through the email. For that reason, it is crucial to be consistent as you go from the subject line to the actual content. You shouldn't use a "clickbait" title just so that users open the message only to disappoint
them upon finding no relevancy to what they initially saw in their inbox. This instills a poor sense of trust with your brand and almost guarantees that users won't take the desired action and that they may even opt-out of receiving your emails. If you have an idea for a subject line but are unsure if it's relevant to your brand, never be afraid to ask your colleagues for feedback. Sometimes, an outsider's perspective can shed some much-needed light onto your ideas. Similarly, segmenting your lists into two groups and A/B testing different subject lines provides you with hard data about which line resonates best with users.
5. Engaging Text
Most recipients receive tons of emails a single day with stale sales pitches. It’s intimidating. Customers trash them immediately. So, it would be a tough task for you to stand out. But, you can escape the embarrassment of being junked if you can narrate interesting stories to your audience.
Run a nurturing series. Tell your customers stories about how your products/services helped many in solving their problems. Share case studies that provide value to them, educate and inform them. You shouldn’t look like a brand that’s merely interested in selling and selling. Instead, tell them that you can offer a solution to their long-standing problem.
Tell them a story that will induce positive emotions. At the bottom of the story, give them away to take action. This call to action shouldn’t be a hard ‘BUY NOW’ or ‘SHOP NOW’. Instead, I recommend going with something like DISCOVER HOW. Taking customers through a journey will be rewarding. If they find it satisfying and worth considering, they will hit the ‘buy button.
6. Calculated Frequency
You have made a great email marketing setup. You have written beautiful email content. You tested with a segmented email list. Despite all your efforts rightly aligned, the campaign tanked. This happened because you didn’t work out the frequency of the emails sent. It’s annoying if email drops in mailboxes at the wrong time.
Timing is important. Frequent emails and emails at the wrong time are sheer waste of energy, resources, and capital invested in the campaign. Keep your eCommerce email marketing communication balanced. In the very beginning, stick to just a few emails over the course of the first week.
If you’re running some promotional campaigns to create outreach, send a few emails to inform customers and create traction.
Besides taming the frequent of emails by your own IQ, you can give your subscribers/customers an option to specify how often they’d like to receive emails.
