19 Jul How To Create A Successful Email Marketing Campaign in 2022
A well-optimized email marketing campaign is still one of the best marketing channels for generating high return on investment in 2022. But with so many brands investing in email marketing, it has become harder than ever to capture and engage your target’s attention in meaningful conversations.
Today, creating successful email marketing campaigns rely on building trust and long-lasting relationships with contacts. Regardless if you’re a one man (or woman) team or have 20,000 employees, MK Group wants to show you how to create an effective email marketing strategy that delivers a high and measurable ROI for your business.
Let’s jump into it.
Email Campaign Game Plan
- Good inbound email marketing means success
- Appropriate segmentation and management of your contact list
- Ensure you’re creating high-performance emails consistently
- Optimize emails to drive conversions
- Choosing the right email templates for your strategy
1. Inbound Marketing
Email marketing is a great way to connect with your target audience, build relationships, and have conversations that help you and your customers grow. That said, email marketing doesn’t work in a silo. A large majority of your business growth depends on your ability to create a human, helpful, customer-driven email marketing strategy that seamlessly integrates with your wider inbound strategy.
Understanding where email marketing fits into inbound methodology is key. Email is the perfect funnel for engaging with contacts and turning them into brand loyalists. Before creating an email strategy or optimizing an existing one there a few things you’ll need to do:
- Software: Implement the right software, preferably one that connects to a contact database that tracks both the qualities and behaviors of your contacts. Doing so helps you segment your contacts and send them personalized emails.
- Full-Funnel Conversations: Contacts are not interacting with your emails in a bubble. They’re reading your blogs, engaging with you on social media, engaging with your chatbot, and more. It’s important to deliver the right information at the right time. Before planning an email campaign, consider if it’s the right channel for your message.
- Goals: Setting and defining goals for email marketing campaigns and for each individual email you send will help you understand how your emails are.
2. Segment & Manage
According to DMA, 77% of email marketing ROI comes from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns. Segmenting your email list empowers you to send the right message to the right person at the right time. Plus, the more relevant and relatable your message is, the more likely your subscribers are to engage with it.
Segmentation also helps you avoid sending emails to the wrong target, which is just as important for building trust, engagement and conversions over the long-term. Be careful though, because jumping straight into segmenting your database without laying down the foundation can backfire.
- Have a clean and organized database
- Collect the right information
- Make sure you can collect the right explicit and implicit data
Be sure to have permission to email contact in your database and to comply with email regulations, such as CAN-SPAM and GDPR.
The segments you create have two vital jobs: number one is sending the right message to the right person at the right time and number two; avoid sending the wrong message to the wrong person at the wrong time. Simple enough. Every business is different so you’ll need to tailor your segments to your business goals. There are three types of segments every business can benefit from:
- Lifecycle Segments
- Buyer Persona Segments
- ‘Health of the Contact Database’ Segments
Creating these segments of unsubscribes, hard bouncers, etc will help you make more educated email marketing campaigns.
3. High-Performance Emails
According to DMA every dollar spent on email, there is a $38 ROI. In addition, 59% of marketers say email is the biggest source of ROI. Decent, eh?
But that ROI isn’t guaranteed by simply drafting an email and pressing ‘send’. Your contacts need to see genuine value in the conversations they have with you before they transition into a paying customer and brand loyalist.
So how exactly do you consistently create meaningful emails? Let’s see:
- SMART Goals: It’s important to define why each email is being sent. By setting a SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely) goal, defining why emails are being sent and each piece of the email supports that goal.
- Right Place, Right Time: When you send the most contextual message, your chances of contacts taking action increase. Why? Because they’re being provided with the most value.
4. Optimization
Once goals are set, you’ll want to drive conversions towards it. There are two key areas to optimize. Email opens and email clicks. This primarily relies on your ability to write engaging copy that creates value for the target audience.
Increase Opens: Curating an engaging subject line is a vital part of getting people to open your emails. Focus on the value you’re providing upfront. If relevant, make use of personalization, such as name or location. Simply put, if the subject line isn’t enticing, the target won’t open the email.
Increase Clicks: Rule number one, never ever use click-bait titles. It doesn’t look good. When a customer opens your email, they’re expecting to see value right away. Provide a single, compelling CTA (call-to-action) to encourage customers to click on your link and follow through on the goal.
5. Templates
You want to send different types of emails to contacts for different types of jobs. As an example, promoting your product or service and sharing your blog updates will require different formats. Define the different types of emails you need to send, then build a set of consistent, on-brand templates.
Some of the most efficient templates are clean, simple, and straightforward.
Wrapping Up
As you grow, your prospects and customers grow too. Your email marketing campaign needs to evolve with them.
One of the best things you can do for the evolution of your email marketing strategy is to keep getting to know your customers and prospects. Regularly talk to your audience and get their feedback to discover new insights, test new ideas, and optimize your email marketing campaign to focus on what actually works.
Even though your email marketing strategy should evolve, one thing will forever remain the same: creating a successful email campaign is about building trust and fostering genuine relationships.