Email marketing and, above all, being successful at it is not something to be taken lightly. Although it may seem like a very simple task (sending an email), in all reality it requires mastering a few marketing techniques and reflecting upon the pertinence of the email-marketing strategy.
How do you create an email-marketing campaign?
In this tutorial, discover the 6 steps for preparing, designing and especially being successful with your first email marketing campaign.
- Define a goal
- Define your target
- Create the subject line
- Write your HTML message
- Send the mailing campaign
- Analyse the results
1. Define a goal
This is the step that will define the rest of your email-marketing strategy. Begin by accurately defining the goal you want to accomplish. Why do you want to do an email-marketing campaign?
There are all sorts of goals:
- To inform with a newsletter
- To present a new product
- To make an important announcement
- To launch a promotional offer
- To compile a quality database
- To do some prospecting
- Etc.
How you create and set up your campaign will depend on the goal you set. All of your choices in terms of targeting, design and discourse will revolve around this goal.
So, take your time when defining a precise goal and be certain that you really have a mailing need.
2. Define your target
Defining the target for your campaign is the second most crucial step. It must naturally ensue from the goal you’ve first established.
If your goal is to strengthen your customers’ loyalty, for example, then the choice of target will obviously revolve around your customer base.
Nonetheless, defining a target is not always that easy.
Going back to our loyalty example, you can first start finding your target by choosing only customers who have not ordered for more than 6 months but who have already spent more than €100 with you.
You have to narrow your target down as accurately as possible to create a campaign that is as pertinent as possible.
The more restricted and precise your targeting is, the more your recipients will feel engaged with your discourse and the closer you will seem to them. There’s nothing more effective than a personalized emailing that’s adapted to the recipients.
3. Create the subject line
The subject line of an emailing is likely the most important element to ensuring success. It’s quite simple. If you don’t give them a reason to open it, your campaign will in the end only have been a waste of time… and money.
This is why you must take your time and find an email subject line that will get a great open rate.
Too often people take the subject line too lightly and choose one at the last minute. However, the subject line is exactly what will get recipients to open it; it’s the gateway to your message.
So, it’s best not to wait until the last minute to think about the subject line for your campaign but rather dedicate several hours to it so you have plenty of time to reflect.
Just how do you come up with an emailing subject line?
There’s no one ideal method, but we recommend the following techniques:
- Don’t work alone; two creative minds are better than one
- Write down all the ideas that come into your head on paper, even the most eccentric ones
- Find at least 20 subject line ideas that have nothing to do with each other
- Then start eliminating and deleting those that seem out of context
- Ask your colleagues for their opinions
- Save at least two and do an A/B test as it’s the best way to find out which one works the best
4. Write an HTML marketing email
In order to write an attractive HTML marketing email, it needs to be done in HTML/CSS code. If this seems complicated to you, no worries: you don’t need any technical knowledge to create a lovely response message. You just need the right tool.
HTML/CSS code simply refers to the programming language hidden behind an email or website. This code can be written A to Z by a web designer using special software like Dreamweaver, for example.
However, there are email marketing tools available so you can simply click and drag to create an email without ever touching any code.
These types of builders are fun, easy-to-use and allow you to create marketing emails and newsletters that are suitable for mobile devices in just a few minutes by moving content blocks or whatever you wish.
Moreover, most email marketing solutions feature galleries of customizable email templates sorted by categories.
These sources of inspiration are quite useful to any marketer who hasn’t really got much time to create an entire message themselves or those who don’t really have a web designer spirit.
Not to mention the fact that the templates suggested in these email marketing solutions are completely customizable and can adapt to any type of business. So, don’t think twice about browsing the galleries of HTML marketing email models available with your solution.
5. Send the marketing email campaign
Sending a marketing email campaign is sometimes a bit stressful, especially when you have to send a message based on a large recipient base.
So, don’t get messed up! Verifying one-by-one that all elements of the campaign are correct before clicking the send button is essential.
Here’s a list of items you mustn’t forget:
- Make sure the web copy and unsubscribe link are present
- Check that all links work
- Test the email to see how it displays on a mobile device
- Send tests with different messaging and webmail systems
- Verify the total size of the campaign does not exceed 150 KB. If you really need a bigger marketing email because you want to add attachments or dense content, test it on all possible inboxes to check that it won’t go right into the SPAM
- Remove the word “Test” from the subject line
- Make sure there’s a pre-header before the web copy
- Test the message response address to be sure you’ll get any responses
Once everything seems OK, get ready to send your message.
However, you must have an email marketing solution with excellent deliverability capacity.
If you’re sending email from one country to same country, it’s best to use a solution with routing infrastructure located in same territory for certification reasons that will have an impact on the success of your campaigns. International solutions won’t be recognized by all French ISPs and it will be more difficult to get them correctly delivered.
6. Analyse the results
An email marketing strategy doesn’t stop at creating and sending campaigns. It’s absolutely fundamental to analyze the statistics of these mailings in depth to better understand what works and what doesn’t.
Thus, professional email marketing solutions are capable of providing essential statistical data after each mailing and in real time.
You can generally get:
- The open rate
- The click rate
- The response rate
- The unsubscribe rate
- The bounce rate
- The complaint rate
- The number of clicks per link
- The devices used for reading
- The recipients’ messaging services
- The OS used for reading
- The recipients’ geolocations
- The exact reading time per contact (only with Mailify)
To find out more about all these data, you can read our articles “The 6 Major Basic email marketing Statistics” and “The 6 Advanced Statistics You Must Know in E-Marketing”.
These data are extremely pertinent and important for understanding why a campaign works or not. If you see a considerable drop in the open rate for your newsletter even though your recipient base hasn’t changed, for example, it may be because your subject line wasn’t very attention-grabbing.
Another example: if your open rate is excellent but your click rate is rather low, it may be due to a not-so-ideal position for your action button.
The many other data provided by your email marketing solution will also allow you to improve your strategy in many ways and will warn you of any mistakes.
Finally, email marketing is not always easy, but it’s also not all that complicated! Although this work requires a bit of concentration and an ounce of creativity, you don’t need all sorts of technical knowledge to create, send and analyse an email marketing campaign. Getting your hands on a complete and easy-to-use solution is more than essential to being able to master your email marketing strategy from A to Z.
Mailify is a professional solution that allows you to very easily engage in email marketing in just a few minutes and without any technical prerequisites.