How to Set Up an Email Marketing Campaign: Step-by-Step Illustrated Guide
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Take a look at our blog on making the most of your transactional emails. Or, you may have an idea for a one-time only email. This will help you create more campaigns in the future, and makes it easier for a team to work together on the project. You can download our template for the requirements doc here. Filling this guide out may also help remind you of some of the steps involved.
Start by filling out the summary for the email, which should let people know what the email is about at a glance. The goal is probably the most important part of the requirements doc. Who you are writing to is very important. Is this email directed at a power-user or a novice? Make sure you know your audience.
Check out a common email myth regarding tone if you need a jumping off point. Personalization is key when it comes to email marketing. Is this email from your CEO, or just a newsletter? Make it clear using your from name and address. Note which segment or list this email will go to. When it comes to personalization, there is nothing better than a well segmented list.
Small businesses or those just starting their email marketing efforts may only have one list. Spend enough time on your subject line that you end up with something really compelling. Note which template will be used for this email, if you have more than one.
Finally, we need to detail the outline. This is where you lay down the bones of your email. Where will the images go? What will they look like? How much copy will you have, and what will it communicate? By writing all of this out carefully in the requirements doc, you make sure that the rest of the team involved in creating this campaign or you yourself at a later date will share the same vision.
A Beginner’s Guide: Email Campaigns From Start to Finish
When creating the outline, keep in mind the final goal of the email. Everything in your email subject line, art work, copy, and so on should be working towards that goal. Now that you have a clear idea of the purpose of your email you can begin writing the copy. Here are a few points to keep in mind when writing your copy:. Avoid stock photos when possible, as these will turn off some readers.
Make sure the images fit correctly within your template.
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We recommend that you keep your total email size under k. Make sure that the artwork pushes the goal of your email. Responsive design is an important consideration when coding an email. Using email analytics see below will help you determine if responsive design is a necessity for your audience.
Email Marketing Best Practices Illustrated [INFOGRAPHIC]
Tracking your email campaigns is the easiest way to quantify the success of those campaigns. Your ESP may offer their own analytics, so check their site to see what options you have.
How to Set Up an Email Marketing Campaign: The Ultimate Step-by-Step Illustrated Guide! [John Lagoudakis] on www.farmersmarketmusic.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying. This 7 step guide walks you through the practical and conceptual process. The 7 Step Guide to Creating an Email Marketing Campaign .. You're going to need a combination of effective visual and textual presentation.
Many beginning email marketers are curious about how email analytics work. When this image is loaded by the reader, the image request is logged by the server. The number of requests and a lot more information is collected by the analytics service, which can then generate statistics on open rates, click-throughs and more. In fact, our advanced analytics can also track how long a user has an email open. For more on reader engagement, check out our email engagement series.
This step is absolutely critical to your success as a marketer. If your email looks like garbage, a recipient is likely to close it without even reading all of your carefully crafted copy. Gmail is notorious for stripping most of the styles from the head of the email, while Outlook is infamous for destroying layouts after rendering them with the Word engine.
In Part III you'll learn how to apply the plan when I analyze two typical trouble spots for email newsletters and what we could do to fix them. Your goals are going to vary by message type, that is to say the goals for your email newsletter, and those of a lead nurturing sequence, are going to be different from one another. The goals for your email campaigns also aren't necessarily the actions you want someone to take from within the email itself, or the stats you get from your email marketing service.
They could be, but think beyond open rates and click rates to how a healthy email marketing program actually benefits your business in the long run. I'll walk through a full example for an email newsletter later in the article. But first, let's finish the remaining steps. This step is where you would develop a dashboard or health summary of your email marketing key performance indicators KPI's , which we'll talk about in the next step. Ask yourself, what would an email marketing program that is meeting my goals look like? How will I be able to demonstrate the performance of different types of campaigns as it relates to overall business goals and specific marketing campaign goals?
Of course, if you don't know the answers to these questions, bring in a professional. It's crucial to know what to measure, and what success is supposed to look like. Now that you know what a healthy, goal-achieving email marketing program looks like, it's time to identify the actual metrics and data points that will funnel into your reports.
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- The 7 Step Guide to Creating an Email Marketing Campaign | GetCRM;
Again, look beyond simple metrics like open and click rates, and think about how subscriber behavior matches up with your buyer personas and value nurturing processes. Also think about the experiences you're creating for each type of email campaign: Now's the right time to bring in a professional if you haven't already, because once you start sending and tracking this data, the hope is that all the pieces work together in the background so all you need to do is focus on those KPI's.
You may need to take a step back and implement some new tools in order to have everything you need to start measuring and improving the performance of your email marketing program. If that's the case, don't worry about bad data at this point, just put the tools in place and start to track some baseline information for a few months.
Free Email Goodies
It's actually a good exercise, because you will have the ability to see if all the data and marketing automation you've set up is working the way you intended, and providing the intelligence you need to make informed decisions about how to improve results. So here we are, at the end of the four steps in our process. In the next part of this article, we will look at a specific type of email the newsletter and walk through the four steps to build out a performance assessment that can then be optimized.
Let's walk through an example. We'll use an email newsletter because it has a broad and diverse purpose in your email marketing toolbox. First, we'll use the framework from above to map out the plan, and current performance, for the email newsletter. Later on, we'll look at an actual email newsletter, measure it up against our plan, and go over how to set up some tests to improve results. Best used as a brand touchpoint, your email newsletter should serve to keep you top of mind with your customers, grow your email list, and help you build out interest-based email segments for when it's time to send a promotional campaign.
A rising trend in subscriptions and engagement rates opens, clicks, replies will signal that your email newsletter is valuable to your audience as a brand touchpoint. A rising trend in subscribers added to interest-based and engagement segments is also important, because it means that the content you're sharing is appealing to more than just a small segment of highly-engaged brand champions.
A rising trend in web, social, phone, and chat activity in the hours following an email newsletter will signify that you have activated your subscribers beyond just the content of the email. Organic Subscription Rate - subscriptions through forms on your site, blog, checkout process, and anywhere else where a website visitor will consent to signing up for your email newsletter.
In other words, leave out the people who get dumped into your email from webinar registrations, trade shows, and of course, bulk list buys. Engager Segment Growth - you should have at least one segment of subscribers who are defined as highly engaged: Report this in absolute numbers. Engager Segment Growth Rates - if you have more than one level of engagement segment, then I would suggest tracking this metric, too. It's kind of like a marketing funnel for your email newsletter. What this will show is the level of interest in your content over time, and could provide some eye-opening insights to direct future decisions on email design, content, and marketing automation.
Interest Segment Growth - interest segments group subscribers by the type of content they are consuming, both in your emails and on your website. Don't forget to include brand content product updates, company news as an interest. You can measure this two ways: Three or more segments? The second way to measure this is to look at the market share of each interest-based segment, which could help inform future decisions on content, marketing automation, and promotion.
Open Rate - you're already familiar with email open rate, which is widely defined as the number of people who opened your email divided by the number of people it was delivered to so bounces are netted out first. Analyzing open rate helps illustrate the general value of your email marketing program; a rising open rate over time means your subscribers continue to trust what's inside your email when they see it in their inbox. Spikes or dips in open rate can help identify deliverability issues, or inform decisions on subject line copy, from field names, sender addresses, pre-header text, and even time of day.
Click Rate - you're probably familiar with email click rate too, which is widely defined as the number of delivered emails that had at least one click again, netting out bounces first.
Similarly, if you have a form that's blowing away the rest, drive more traffic to it or the pages where it appears. This is the environment in which email marketers compete to attract, engage, nurture, and ultimately convert leads. We are using cookies to give you the best experience on our website. The goal is probably the most important part of the requirements doc. Interest Segment Growth - interest segments group subscribers by the type of content they are consuming, both in your emails and on your website. Three or more segments? Is this email from your CEO, or just a newsletter?
Just like open rate, a rising click rate is another value indicator. And just like open rate, you can look deeper at the stats across email newsletter campaigns, which typically have more than one link in them, to see if your subscribers are using the email newsletter as a launching point for one piece of information or multiple pieces.
- The 7 Step Guide to Creating an Email Marketing Campaign.
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Click-to-Open Rate - if click rate is used to gauge the ability of your email newsletter to drive traffic to your website, click-to-open rate is used to gauge the ability of individual links within the email newsletter to drive traffic to your website. It's calculated by dividing the number of people who clicked on at least one link by the number of people who opened the email. CTOR is an optimization metric that you'll want to use with email design tests. That said, you can and should have a primary link or call to action in each of your email newsletters; tracking the CTOR for this link can help inform email design and copy decisions, especially if you cross reference this information with other subscriber stats like mobile device usage, time of day, and the experience you're creating with that particular link.
If you can't specifically attribute inbound calls, chats, replies, and lead forms to marketing sources, measuring any uptick during the first hours after sending your email will likely mean those new leads came from your newsletter doing its job as a brand touchpoint. Web Traffic - You should use campaign tagging with any links in your email newsletters that point to your website, so you can get a complete picture directly in Google Analytics or whatever visitor tracking tool you use of subscriber behavior once they click through from the email to your website.
Then, you'll have a way to measure the impact of the traffic from your email newsletter over time, and for any report you want to look at. I'll be candid with you, and say that not all of these metrics are readily available in your email marketing system, or even a marketing automation platform. You may need to break out an Excel spreadsheet and talk to your dev team about pulling API data to create a dashboard or just track things by hand. Nevertheless, here is what you'll need to be able to get the data that feeds the KPI's that create the reports that help you see if you're meeting your goals:.
Email Marketing Best Practices Illustrated [INFOGRAPHIC] - DirectIQ
Organic Subscription Rate - you need some method of tagging subscribers by subscription source. If you aren't using tagging, it's arguably one of the most flexible and smart ways to manage subscriber data. A side note about engager and interest segments: If you don't have the ability to use tagging with your subscribers, then use behavioral activity within your emails and from site tracking on your website.
A high engager would be someone who "has opened the last 5 emails and clicked on at least one link in each. The downside to this approach is that you'll have to manually adjust your criteria each time you send an email, whereas tagging and behavioral triggers can be set up once, and work in the background. Open Rate, Click Rate, Click-to-Open Rate - you can get all of these from your email marketing service's campaign reports.
Nothing to set up on your part. Give the person next to a high-five instead. Unless, of course, you implement campaign tracking with UTM strings. Then, as I mentioned earlier, you'll be able to identify visitor behavior on your site that came from your email newsletter. Let's stick with our email newsletter, and look at how these KPI's can help us find shortcomings in our email marketing program, and pinpoint the areas where we can make data-informed decisions about copy, design, timing, segmentation, personalization, and all the other tactical areas of email marketing.
In this final section, I'm going to tackle two common problem areas for email newsletters. This problem is one where your email newsletter has plateaued. Symptoms include consistent open and click-through rates, and little to no movement in either interest or engager segments.