Marketing Articles & Tips

How To Send Email Marketing Campaigns

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Easy to Understand Steps on How to Send an Email Marketing Campaign

Establish the Purpose of Your Email Marketing Campaign – To start your e-mail campaign off, be sure to establish a clear purpose or goal you wish to achieve.

2. Build & Prepare Your Email List – Develop an email list by encouraging current, previous & prospective customers to provide you with their email address. Targeted opt-in email lists of individuals interested in what you offer can also be purchased at reasonable prices.

3. Establish a Time Table – Decide on how frequently you will be sending your broadcasts. There is a fine line between over doing it and not reaching out enough in order to build and maintain long-term relationships. Using a mixture of useful content and promotional messages and broadcasting it a different time slots is an acceptable method. Avoid sending too many promotional related emails.

4. Send Emails When Your Audience is Most Receptive – Independent studies have shown the best response rates are generated from email campaigns sent on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 2-3 o’clock in the afternoon.

5. Write a Super Compelling Email Message – The text body content of your email message is extremely important. Ensure your message builds interest with strong content, exciting news or special offers. Make sure you always include a sense of urgency with any promotional message – (i.e. Offer expires Friday). Situate important parts of your message in the very first paragraph. Use bullet points to make it easy to read. Well positioned content will help convert an email that is opened and read into a click through to a web page or a direct phone call to your place of business.

6. Use a Strong & Interesting Subject Line – First impressions are everything! Capture the recipients’ attention with a short and interesting subject line. Studies have proven that a well written subject line can produce amazing open rates.

7. Strong Call to Action – Use words that urge the reader of a promotional message to take immediate action such as “Call Now,” or “Click Here”. A retail advertisement without a call-to-action is considered incomplete and does not convert well.

8. Try to be Personable – Let’s face it: Getting one-on-one personal attention is better than dealing with a faceless corporation any day of the week. Refrain from trying to sound professional and tone down the corporate speak. Your customers and prospects are your friends. Speak to them like real people. Your response and click-thru rates will depend on it.

9. Include an Unsubscribe Link – Refrain from holding the recipients of your message hostage and provide your readers with an easy and convenient method to unsubscribe from your list. It is mandated by law that you must honor all unsubscribe requests within 10 days. In addition, avoid the use of deceptive headers, from-names, reply-to email addresses and subject lines. All unsubscribe links in your outbound messages must be functional for at least 30 days after your campaign has been sent. Lastly, always include your physical mailing address in the footer of your message to identify yourself (PO Boxes are not sufficient).

10. Tracking Performance – Don’t push this step aside. Tracking the links in your outbound messages will allow you to gain very useful insight to reveal what works and what doesn’t within your campaigns. Tracking is a standard feature in certain email marketing systems like Reliant Email. Tracking details are extremely helpful when fine tuning your email campaigns. Track which subject lines produced the largest number of opens during your campaign. Determine which messages produce the greatest amount of calls to your office or clicks to your site.

11. Refine and Repeat the process on how to send email marketing campaign – What did you pick up from your initial go around?

Be certain to ask yourself:
1. What parts of my campaign failed and which parts succeeded?
2. Did I accomplish the results I set out to achieve in Step 1?
3. On my next campaign, what could I do better to improve the potential for an increase in responses and conversions? Always continue to fine tune your methodology and pick up things from your experiences and from interacting with your customers. Continue to cycle through these 11 steps in an effort to build a successful email marketing endeavor that makes your prospects and customers coming back over and over again.

Emarketing Solutions makes an effort to teach, inform and provide useful information on how to send email marketing campaigns responsibly and effectively.  If you have any questions on how we can help you, please feel free to contact us.