How to Start Your Email Marketing Campaign

Melanie Green
3 min readAug 8, 2016

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Email marketing represents a major opportunity for you to successfully market your brand. It’s cost effective and proven to engage customers in a way that drives sales. If you’re just starting to consider email marketing, read these six tips as you carefully plan and craft your first campaign.

1. Choose an Email Marketing Platform

To send out marketing emails, you need to sign up for an email platform to design, write, and distribute them. If you used your regular email account, you’d quickly max out the number of emails you can send out in a day.

Fortunately, there is a wide range of options available for you to choose from that are cost-effective, if not free. Some of the industry leaders include:

· Mail Chimp — Free for up to 2,000 subscribers

· AWeber — Starts at $19 a month

· Get Response — Starts at $15 a month

· Constant Contact — Starts at $20 a month

2. Build Your Email Subscriber List

An email marketing campaign is futile if you don’t have anyone to send it to. Build your email subscription list by putting a sign up form on your website and social media pages. Ask former customers if they want to join your list. At community events, bring a sign up form. Try to incentive the signup process so people are more likely to join, even if it’s a 5% off coupon.

3. Select Relevant Sections

Whether you’re writing a set of automated emails to go out to new subscribers or one-off email newsletter, determine what information you want to include in every email. Maybe you put a branded header on the top of each email with your company’s information and a sidebar with upcoming events or sales. You want your emails to be consistently branded to improve customer experiences.

4. Set Firm Deadlines and Expectations

Your email subscribers will start to expect your newsletter or sales emails if you send them on a consistent basis. Plan on emailing them on a schedule, either the same day every month or week to start and they’ll look forward to reading them. Don’t suddenly stop sending content when you get busy because customers will notice.

5. Write Engaging Content

If you send out less than stellar content, people won’t read or share it. Aim to write high quality content that your audience wants to read. If you can’t write, consider hiring a copywriting or marketing company to do it for you.

6. Analyze Performance and Make Improvements

One of the most important aspects of any email marketing campaign is analyzing performance. Find out how many people opened, read, and engaged with your emails from inside your email marketing platform. Look for common things among the best performing emails and replicate their successes by covering similar topics or offering equivalent promotions.

For many companies, adding email marketing benefits customer engagement and sales. Although it takes time to build a list, it’s well worth the effort.

Melanie Green is a Tampa-based freelance writer and the CEO of the Triassic Media Group, where she and her team provide transparent and affordable content marketing for clients across the United States. She earned her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing with a focus in screenwriting from National University and her Bachelor of Arts in Writing from the University of Tampa. You can check out more of her work here.

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