From planning to writing and design, discover what makes a good email marketing campaign with our industry insights, actionable tips, and free advice.
Pity the fool who said, “Email marketing is dead”. Although it’s over 50 years old, email is very much alive and kicking in the marketing world.
If anything, it might actually be the most effective marketing strategy available to businesses, with 347.3 billion emails sent and received each day.
But where do you begin creating an email marketing campaign that becomes more than just another desperate bunch of forgettable subject lines clogging up someone’s inbox?
In this piece, we discuss how to create a successful email marketing campaign that engages your reader through good planning, writing and design alongside the types of email campaigns you can use.
What is an email marketing campaign?
An email marketing campaign is a series of individual emails sent to consumers over a specific period. The campaign will contact numerous recipients in your email list in the hope of engaging your audience and driving conversions for your business.
Email marketing campaigns can have specific purposes and agendas for your business. They can target consumers based on distinct demographics and be used at different stages of your buyer journey.
Types of email campaigns
Email campaigns come in all shapes and sizes. From welcoming new subscribers to promoting your products or services, each business goal has the ideal email campaign ready and waiting.
Here is a quick list of some emails you can use in your campaigns:
- Welcome emails
- Newsletters
- Lead nurturing emails
- Promotional emails
- Cart abandonment emails
- Re-engagement emails
- Transactional emails
What works best for your business is what appeals more to your audience. And this is all bound to differ depending on your industry and intentions.
For example, some marketers create an email marketing campaign known as the “52-weeker”. Yep, that’s planning, crafting and sending an email every week of the year.
While this might seem like going overboard, 52-weeker campaigns can form the strongest connections with your consumers.
Like any form of marketing, it all depends on the guile of your strategy, the quality of your content and whether your solution is solving the problem of your consumer.
Do email marketing campaigns work?
With a global revenue set to reach $11 billion by 2024, there’s no doubt why so many marketers would invest in email campaigns as an effective marketing strategy if it wasn’t worthwhile.
Some would even go as far as saying email is the most effective marketing form.
Here are a few stats that show how well email marketing campaigns can perform for your business:
- For every $1 spent on email marketing, the average ROI is $44.
- 79% of marketers list email marketing as their top 3 most effective marketing channels.
- 81% of SMBs use email as their main marketing strategy for customer acquisition.
- 77% of marketers witnessed an increase in email engagement over 12 months.
- 49% of consumers would like to receive promotional emails from their favourite brands weekly.
What makes a good email marketing campaign?
Three things make a good email marketing campaign:
- Strategy
- Content
- Design
The best email marketing campaigns are defined by how well you engage your audience. And that doesn’t mean simply flogging as many products and services as possible.
Instead, great email campaigns can continually add value to your reader with actionable tips and guides or by simply telling them a joke to brighten up their day.
Ultimately, whatever drives more leads and fulfils your goals will define the effectiveness of your campaign.
How to plan an email marketing campaign
Before creating your email campaign, you need a plan, and any good email campaign plan will follow these steps:
- Establish your email marketing goals.
- Understand the different types of emails.
- Know your audience.
- Construct a targeted email list.
Essentially, your business goals and target audience will dictate the strategy behind your email campaign. Your strategy will also need to consider the frequency of emails you send over a period and what times.
For example, open rates are higher during weekdays compared to the weekends. Thursdays are generally considered the best day, with Tuesday second and Saturday as the worst.
If you’re a B2B business, your initial strategy should be based on developing trust and adding value to your recipients. On the other hand, with B2C, your primary focus will rest on how best to promote your products or services.
With this in mind, what data can you gather to segment your email list into different categories?
For example, whether you want to appeal to small business owners or Gen Z consumers, it pays to know who in your list fits the bill.
While this may seem like a big effort on the surface, segmented email campaigns can lead to a 760% increase in revenue. So, before you divide and conquer, pull the data that helps you target your preferred buyer personas.
Later, this consumer data can work wonders when personalising your content during the writing stage.
How to write an email marketing campaign
As with the strategy, how you write an email marketing campaign depends on the audience and your intentions.
Promotional emails aim to sell. Welcome emails and newsletters look to nurture.
So, whether you’re hoping to drive conversions or retain your subscribers, the language will change accordingly.
Give time to your subject lines
Like impactful blog titles and eye-grabbing newspaper headlines, so much rests on those opening few words.
Grab their attention and provide value with a purpose to open the email. You can use action-orientated words or cast a sense of mystery.
Piquing their interest and offering value is the way, but you keep it brief. We suggest no more than 30-50 characters.
You can use emojis to stand out and add some more character, but only if they apply to the content. Otherwise, it can just seem a bit cheap and spammy.
Speaking of spam, avoid needy, exaggerated and desperate language like “100% off”, “Best Price”, and “Urgent” or you’ll just end up in the junk pile.
Write like a human
Regardless of email type, your language should always try to remain human and relevant. From talking about the weather to remarking on recent trends, if whatever your business has to say somehow relates to your consumer, work it in.
These constant touchpoints help keep your voice topical and relevant.
So, the first question you should ask after writing your email should be – “Is what you’ve written human?”
Because why would anyone want to engage with mumbo jumbo content that sounds like it’s just been churned out of some half-hearted Chat GPT prompt?
Although the content will drive your conversions, it’s humans who make connections.
So, write to your consumer as you would speak to them.
Otherwise, if you treat the email like a transactional exchange between a business and a consumer, the language will inevitably follow suit. Connect with the person behind the consumer.
Apply personalisation
Enhancing the connection with your reader increases with personalisation as personalised emails get opened 82% more than the bog standard.
And it shouldn’t come as a surprise that people like things way more when you make it about them.
So, apply that data from your targeted email list and filter it into your content.
These details could be anything from knowing your recipient's location to remembering they have a pet dog or wishing them a happy birthday.
Some writing email marketing 101 for you is don’t be afraid to get personal.
Tell them a story
As a series of emails within one campaign, you’re fundamentally creating a narrative between your brand and its consumers.
Rather than go through the motion between one email and the next, this is your big chance to tell a story with your brand and its consumers as the two main characters.
Successful 52-weeker email campaigns work because they’re connected. The reader goes back for more because they recognise the voice, and they want to know what’s going to happen next.
Keep your tone of voice (TOV) consistent so the reader recognises you, develops trust and uses what they’ve already learned about out to what they can potentially know next.
How to design an email marketing campaign?
In some ways, the design of your email is just as vital as the content.
As soon as your reader opens that email, if you haven’t engaged them immediately with attractive visuals and an impactful headline, you might have lost them before they read the first sentence.
A clutter of content with chunky paragraphs is a fast way to high bounce rates, no matter the quality or time you put into crafting those sentences.
At this stage, whitespace becomes your friend. Leaving space on the page and breaking up your content with imagery, animation, or videos allows the reader to concentrate more on the words.
To enhance that crucial first impression, it helps to visually appeal to your reader with HTML designs or interactive email design options rather than settle for plain text email.
But whichever design option you choose, keep your branding consistent with the same design across your campaign and always include eye-catching CTA buttons and icons to direct your reader to their intended action.
How to check email marketing campaign performance?
With your email campaigns in full flow, now it’s time to check how well they’ve been getting on:
Open rate
The first metric to look for is your email open rate. You can do this on ‘Outlook’ by going to your sent folder and selecting the “insights” button on the home ribbon. Here, you can see your open rate and the number of forwards. A good email open rate should be between 17-28%.
Conversion rate
Next, what is your all-important conversion rate? Whether making a purchase or filling out a form, the conversion rate is the intended action of your reader and the main basis for your campaign.
You can calculate your conversion rate by dividing the number of recipients who received your email by the number of those who converted. Unlike open rates, conversion rates are much lower, and a good number would be anything between 2-5%.
Landing page bounce rate
If your email campaign intends to take your consumer to a separate landing page, check the bounce rate.
If the bounce rate is high (55%+), evaluate whether your email and landing page are aligned and correspond with each other.
Website Traffic
Measuring your website traffic with Google Analytics and Google Search Console can also show the amount of traffic that your email campaign directed to your website. To get these insights, you’ll need to set up Campaign Tracking.
How to improve email marketing campaigns
There are several ways you can improve your email campaigns. Whether spicing up your language and writing with more rhythm or segmenting your email lists more thoroughly, testing different methods and approaches can help you find what works best for your business.
Using your email campaign performance data, you can see which emails have performed better than others to gain further insights to enrich your future campaigns.
If your open rates are high, you know you have nailed your subject lines, but if the conversions are low, then you should pay more attention to the design and how well you’re encouraging your reader to convert.
Embracing technology can also improve efficiency and reduce human error. Whether that’s pumping your content through Grammarly to check for errors and readability or using platforms like HubSpot and Mailchimp as an all-in-one email marketing solution, there are handy tools available to help streamline your efforts and provide valuable insights.
However, the main lesson to remember is no one becomes an email marketing campaign expert overnight. It takes time to find your flow, and that tends to come with experience and a willingness to learn.
Gain more email marketing insights and advice
If you have room for more content marketing insights, Content Chef has crafted a series of helpful guides and blogs to help your business.
From the best social media marketing tools and apps to how to generate blog ideas, check out our recent blog series and be sure to fill your boots.
Likewise, if you have any questions about how our Content Marketing services can help your needs, get in touch today.
Written by Archie Edwards
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