How to launch your first email campaign

Watch Now: Email Marketing Campaign Step by Step Guide ⭐️ | 7 Steps to success

Are you planning to launch your first email campaign, but have no idea where to start?

You have come to the right place!

Welcome back to the series, “Email Marketing 101 for Business Owners.” This series will teach you what you need to know to begin email marketing and take your business to the next level.

In the last instalment, we discovered the 3 Steps to Get Started with Email Marketing.

Today we will talk about email marketing campaign development. You will be provided with a step-by-step guide to rock your first email campaign.

The seven steps in our email campaign development guide are:

1. Define the purpose of the campaign and the target audience. Make sure it fits in your overall marketing strategy

2. Embrace best practices and review previous campaigns

3. Plan out every email

4. Write the copy for each email

5. Create design assets

6. Create the emails and schedule them

7. Send out emails automatically or manually

8. Analyze performance

Now that you have an overview of the seven steps, let’s dive deep into each of them one by one.

STEP 1. Define the purpose of the campaign and the target audience

Before writing any email copy, you need to give yourself time to reflect. You might have an idea of why you want to send out an email campaign, but trust me, it’s better not to rush into an email campaign. You might only take up time and yield little to no results.

First, define the purpose of your email campaign and how it fits in your overall marketing strategy. Don’t forget to determine who this email will go out to your target audience. For example:

1. If you want to stay on your audience’s radar and connect with them regularly via email, we recommend launching a monthly newsletter.
2. Suppose you want to get to know your audience better. In that case, create a series of onboarding emails. Use this series not only to introduce yourself and your company but to get to know your audience better. Ask them about their preferences. How often do they want to receive emails from you? What topics or products are they potentially interested in? Basically, assess if they are the right prospect for your business.
3. If you want to launch a series of sales emails, you must know who in your database is ready to buy from you and create a list of those contacts. You can also write down how you will position your solutions as the best possible solution to meet your audience’s needs.
4. Now you can decide on the end goal and identify the main Call to Action button in all your emails.

STEP 2. Embrace best practices and review previous campaigns

If you are entirely new to email marketing, I recommend you become familiar with the best practices. For example:

- make sure to have a healthy and active list of email contacts

- understand how to avoid your audience unsubscribing from your emails

- identify how many times should you be emailing your audience

- learn what SPAM words to avoid in your emails so that you don’t end up in the spam folder

- figure out what makes an email look good and pleasant to read.

If you have already been sending out email campaigns, examine your analytics reports. You can quickly identify the best performing subject lines and call to action buttons, which you can re-use in future campaigns and improve your email performance.

STEP 3. Plan out every email

At this stage, you might want to look at your marketing calendar. Verify that your email campaign won’t overlap with any other marketing campaign you have already scheduled.

This is a crucial step. You don’t want to send out mixed messages to your audience or interfere with a big launch.

Additionally, make sure you are not sending too many emails to the same contacts, so as to not confuse and distract them. Suppose you send the emails with different actions. In that case, they might get overwhelmed and decide not to take action on any of your offers.

Define how many emails you want to send in total and what role these emails play in your email campaign. At this stage, you have the freedom to experiment and draft multiple scenarios and see which of them you think will perform best. Do you think three emails are enough to close the deal? You might want to ease into it, so five emails would give your audience a better chance to warm up and get excited about your offer. Play around with the messaging to get it right.

STEP 4. Write the copy for each email

Now that you have a plan in place, it’s time to get creative and start writing the copy for each of your emails. There are several must-have email copy components that you need to think about:

1. Enticing email subject line
2. Recognized sender name
3. Optimized headlines
4. Distinct hierarchy of content
5. Clear and concise copy
6. Actionable call to action button

If you want to learn about all seven email components, watch this video.

STEP 5. Create design assets

Have you heard the expression “design assets”? Design assets are basically images that bring dull, text-only emails to life. As we all know, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” so don’t forget to use imagery to visualize your message. Whether you feature an image of a product, a downloadable ebook, an infographic, a smiling person or even a picture of you, images are key.

STEP 6. Create the emails and schedule them

You’re almost ready to launch your email campaign. All you have left to do is take your copy, your design assets and create your email. When it comes to email creation, I advise you to keep these five best practices in mind:

1: Use actual text

2: Left align the text

3: Feature the CTA above the fold

4: Use Headlines

5: Create with mobile in mind

If you need some inspiration to make your emails look sleek, visit the website verygoodemails.com. They have an abundance of different styles. Whenever I lack creativity and need to refresh my email layouts, I always go to this website.

When it comes to scheduling, schedule all your emails and let your audience flow through your campaign automatically. This will free up a lot of time in your agenda, as you won’t need to go back every week and press “launch” or “send” on your next email in the campaign series.

STEP 7. Analyze performance

The final step comes after all of your emails have been sent out. Analyzing the data, learning from your mistakes and finding opportunities to improve and optimize is crucial in digital marketing.

To understand your metrics and get the most insight into how your campaigns are performing, you might need to familiarize yourself with the most essential email marketing metrics, such as:

1. Delivery rate
2. Open rate
3. Click-to-open rate
4. Bounce rate
5. Unsubscribe rate
6. Conversion rate

When analyzing your emails, you might want to ask yourself these five questions:

1. What goal did you want to achieve?
2. Who was this email campaign sent to?
3. Which email was opened the most and why?
4. Which email received the most engagement and why?
5. How can you optimize email performance in the future?

After you master the basics of email marketing analytics, you might want to see how A/B split testing can help you improve your emails and other marketing activities.

To recap, we have reviewed seven crucial steps that can help you get organized, focus your efforts and develop an email campaign that will help you deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.

If you need help developing your marketing strategy, make sure to reach out to the Spin Ideas team!