How to Create an Email Marketing Campaign
It is now a given in the world of business that every company, large or small, should have some kind of email marketing program.
Email Marketing: A Primer
Why? Because all your customers use email, every day. To be precise, there are 4 billion (with a B) email users in the world. That’s about one-half the population of the entire world. It’s safe to assume that includes all your customers, real and potential.
Second, statistics show that for every dollar expended in email marketing, the return on investment (ROI) is $36. Email marketing is inexpensive and when it works, you can make a lot of money.
Where it starts: your email list
Successful email marketing begins with your targeted email list. It takes some effort to build your organic list, and some effort to maintain it. But the mailing list is the alpha and omega of email marketing.
You should have a way to capture the email addresses of all your customers. Those who have purchased your product or service are your prime targets. Assuming they liked what they already bought, they will probably be ready to buy more.
The second step is to convert as many of your website visitors as possible into targets by capturing their email addresses. People who visit your website are interested in what you’re selling, to one degree or another. The key is getting them to sign up to receive communications from your company. While your existing customers are ‘already-boughts,’ those who visit your website and agree to hear more from your company are ‘targets.’
To get web surfers to agree to sign up (give you their email address) often requires some kind of enticement. In return for their email address, you offer them a freebie: a special discount, a free something, an invitation to a special event … anything to get them agree to join your mailing list.
To do this, you can design your website with multiple opportunities, including welcome to the site popups, and ‘before you leave’ popups.
Building your customer list this way is considered ‘organic’ and within ethical standards, as opposed to buying a mailing list of potential customers and mass-emailing messages to that list. That is called spam and is considered a no-no. It is also ineffective, as most people begin their day by going through their email boxes and deleting such emails without reading.
Understanding email types
There are basically three categories of emails in marketing.
Promotional emails are messages that make offers, alert the reader to sales, and are self-promotional.
Relational emails open up engagement with the reader. These might include informational newsletters about the company and its activities, or messages that fulfill the reader’s requests for some of the goodies you promised them. While promotional emails say ‘here’s the deal,’ relational emails say ‘let’s talk.’
Finally, there are transactional emails, which include things like welcome messages, signup confirmations, order or purchase confirmations, shipping notices and more.
Email marketing goals
As in all aspects of your business, it’s best to set some goals and metrics for your email marketing efforts. These can include:
Increasing brand awareness. Spread the word about your brand, product and services by sharing news, updates and more.
Generate website traffic. Drive traffic to your website by sharing snippets of your content from published articles, blog posts and the like. Add calls-to-action on your sales and promotions that take readers to your landing and sales pages (where you have a box or a popup to collect their email data.)
Drive sales and revenue. Email will put your products and services right in front of your customers. Offer discounts, free shipping, share roundups and collections, and use upselling and cross-selling to increase the size of the order.
Boost your other marketing channels. Your email messages can recommend visits to your social media channels, blogs, and live sales and other events. Ask customers to post reviews on Facebook or start an Instagram challenge and invite your customers to participate.
Engage customers. You can experiment with messaging via email, test products, get feedback and so much more.
Gather valuable customer data. Using tracking analytics on your email marketing, you can gather valuable customer insights and data and learn more about their behavior. You can also send out surveys and feedback forms. You can leverage this information to improve your emails, marketing efforts and even your own products and services.
There are numerous companies and apps on the market to help you design and implement effective email marketing campaigns, from Constant Contact to MailChimp and hundreds more.
Fuel Media also has expertise in designing effective campaigns for businesses of all sizes. To get started, give us a call and we’ll set up a consultation for your company and get you started down the right email road.
