While social media and influencer marketing have slowly taken the digital landscape by storm, there are still a couple of long-established marketing techniques, like email marketing, that still retain their reputation as an effective way to generate and nurture leads. However, despite being considered a tried and tested approach, your email marketing strategy can still be a failure if not properly executed and without a viable plan. To avoid that, here’s a simple guide on planning and implementing an effective email marketing campaign.
Set your marketing goals (and building your email marketing strategy).
Every plan isn’t complete without a clear and achievable goal. Before you can even start the email marketing campaign, you need to establish why you’re sending it in the first place. Having a clear set of goals will help guide you throughout your campaign. Whatever your email campaign is about, you need to make sure that your goal is:
- Clear
- Achievable
- Time-bound
- Measurable
- Realistic
Build a mailing list with quality contacts.
The next logical step in your planning process is to gather the list of contacts whom you will email. There are several ways you can collect email addresses for your database.
Perhaps the easiest way is to buy an existing email list and use it as a starting point. While that may sound convenient and costly, such an approach isn’t recommended for a high sender reputation. Whenever you purchase contact lists, you basically get recipients who never agreed to receive your emails. Chances are, your mail will go straight to their spam folders.
A great way to collect contact information is to add subscription forms to your website and social media. By doing this, you’ll be able to collect a quality list of subscribers who volunteered their info and are eager to hear from you. Be creative in how you design your forms and where you put it as long as it gets the attention of users without outright annoying them.
Segment your audience to send relevant content.
Most marketers fail to realize that making a one-size-fits-all message doesn’t work that well with a direct mail campaign. In this approach, personalization is key to conversion, which is why your next step should be to segment your audience. According to recent studies, data segmentation is the third most effective tactic used in email marketing. Segmentation allows you to target your audience by categorizing them based on a couple of variables:
- Demographics
- Location
- Purchase history
- User’s activity
- Interests and preferences
- Lifecycle stage
Now that you’ve effectively segmented your audience, you can easily make a personalized message that you can send to them.
Create personalized subject messages.
Apart from sending relevant content, database segmentation also allows you to create personalized content for your audience, as mentioned above. That includes creating custom subject lines that are more likely to catch the attention of the recipient. Who wouldn’t want to open an email that talks directly to them? You can then use the data you’ve gathered to craft the perfect message to market your product or service to your target audience.
Conclusion
Those are just the first few steps you can take to kick off your email marketing campaign. It all starts with careful planning if you want your strategy to be as effective and successful as you want it to be. Hopefully, this guide will help you get started on your own campaign.
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