How to Build an Email Campaign That Drives Sales for Your Business
Here’s a question that I get a lot:
How do you create an email campaign that transforms clicks into sales?
In reality, email campaigns are more than just emails with sales pitches. Understanding the necessary steps required to create an effective campaign is crucial to attract paying customers that spend their hard earned cash on your business.
What are these tips and tricks? How can they help grow your business? In this article, we’ll tell you everything you need to know.
1. Segment Your Audience
There are different kinds of email campaigns. There are emails sent to promote products, educate new customers, provide weekly newsletters and introduce updates. But, your customers don’t want to receive too many emails from your business.
Unless you want to be accused as a spammer, you’ll need to be strategic. You need to segment your audience and determine the types of emails that they’ll read based on demographic, psychographic or behavioral data.
Demographic Data
Demographic data includes the most basic information such as age, gender, location and job. These are just the basics, but it can make or break your campaign.
Let’s say you’re in the fashion industry. Would you send the same email to both males and females? No female wants to receive an email that promotes male products! So, segment your audience based on demographic data to send them emails that are meant for them.
Psychographic Data
Psychographic data includes information such as attitudes, interests and beliefs of your customers. You can get psychographic data through surveys and interviews to get a better understanding of your target market.
Behavioural Data
A lot of businesses use behavioral data to create email campaigns. They send product recommendations based on purchase history, browsing history and so on. Segmenting your users based on behavioral data not only allows you to effectively upsell the right products to the right consumers, but it also prevents you from sending emails that will likely be ignored.
2. Plan and Determine Your Triggers
It’s easy to send an email. But sending it at the right moment? Well, that’s another story. How many emails should you send? Who should you send it to, and in what order?
The sequences and triggers in your campaign will play a crucial role on your success. Consider how many emails you’ll need to deliver your message, when users will need it, and its relevance.
Let’s say your email campaign’s objective is to get customers to buy because of a sale. Take a look at the drip sequence of CreativeLive for their 40% Off sitewide promo.
Email # 1: Get a Jump on Your Dreams for 2017
Email # 2 : 10 Great Classes for $19 (+Up to 40% Off Everything Else )
Email # 3: 24 Hour Extension : 10 Amazing Classes for $19 (+ up to 40% off all other classes!)
The example shows how effective titles and email sequences can encourage customers to fulfill their campaign’s objectives.
In addition, there are two types of triggers you can use for your email campaign — actions or demographic, psychographic and behavioral information.
Emails triggered by actions:
- A user signs up to your email course, and you send them lessons and instructional materials every week.
- A customer makes a purchase, and you send them an order confirmation email and a shipping confirmation email (with product recommendations)
- The user indicates that he prefers to receive newsletters on a weekly basis and that he wants to receive product updates. So, you send weekly newsletters to his inbox and send updates on new products.
Emails triggered by demographics, psychographics and behavioral data:
- Last month, a user bought dog food from your website, so you send them an email to remind them to buy dog food again.
- The user’s free trial is about to end, so you send them an email that upsells a paid plan to use your product.
- A user keeps browsing your site for prom dresses, so you send them a list of best selling prom dresses from your online store.
Nothing’s worse than getting an email that’s not relevant to your actions and interests. So, make sure that your emails have the right triggers. Users want to receive the emails that are relevant to them.
3. Write Your Message
When it comes to writing your emails, remember your brand’s voice and personality. No one will remember your emails if your tone and language is dull and boring.
Are you supposed to be funny, witty or approachable? If you’re a makeup brand for young females, you might want to send emails that seem fun and conversational. Here’s an example from Althea:
If your email is meant to educate customers, then write copy with clear instructions.
Vero content editor — Jimmy Daly — discussed how to write great promotional emails from Evernote, emphasizing the importance of a clear context, strong verbs and benefits. You should also send emails with great designs to motivate customers to read it.
4. Measure Your Success
Since you spent a lot of time segmenting your audience, creating triggers and crafting a good message, you want to make sure that your campaign is making its intended impact.
Fortunately, measuring your campaign’s success is simple. You can use UTM codes to determine the source of the traffic (i.e. who clicked the link on the email and in which email the link is found).
For example, you might want to include a UTM code in an email to find out the traffic to your website or landing page, that were a direct result of that specific email. You can then view the data on Google Analytics. This makes it easy for you to determine how effective your email campaign is at generating traffic and bringing revenue to your business.
Here’s the difference between a link with a UTM code and a link without a UTM code:
Without UTM Code:
With UTM Code:
You can also use services like RightInbox to see who opens and clicks your emails in Gmail.
Channels Report
You can then track the results of your email efforts and compare it against other marketing channels (i.e, organic search, direct, social) in the Channels Report section. Simply visit Google Analytics and click Acquisition > Overview > All Traffic > Channels on the sidebar.
The Campaigns Report
You can also visit the Campaigns report section to determine the impact of your campaigns and to compare it against other campaigns. You can access this by clicking “Email” in the “Channel Report” section.
Besides Google Analytics, you can also use MailChimp and Vero to measure your email marketing results. With the right data, you won’t walk blindly on the road to improvement.
Ready to Create Effective Email Campaigns?
There’s a lot of work required to create an effective email campaign. You’ll need to segment your audience, generate data, determine triggers, write compelling messages and so on.
It might seem difficult in the beginning, but as you create more campaigns, you’ll eventually get used to it. If you forget any of these steps, you can always come back to this blog post for reference.
Got any tips for creating email campaigns? Let us know in the comments below.
Monique Danao is a freelance writer with an expertise in digital marketing and SEO. Her work can be found on Business2Community, Medium, and Schedugram. Tweet at @monique_pd to say hello ✌️
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