Email Marketing Best Practices: Creating a Campaign (2023)

Jar Creative, an agency specializing in online marketing, outlines 10 important steps for building an email marketing campaign from the ground up. Each key aspect is highly detailed, but integral to success in email marketing. Consider referencing these steps every time you launch a new campaign.

1. Create a clear goal.

2. Segment your audience.

3. Create a compelling headline.

4. Pay attention to timing.

5. Optimize for your brand.

6. Focus on design and compatibility.

7. Create a clear call to action.

8. Create an effective landing page.

9. Set up tracking.

10. Test, test, and test again.

A clear goal means very little if you don’t know who you’re sending emails to. When you first build your email list, you must have permission to email your customers and subscribers. Initially, there are many ways to get people on your list. You can offer a discount on a first purchase, advertise your newsletter subscription, or offer a free e-book. But in any scenario, you need to be sure you have a very strong call to action (CTA).

According to Kissmetrics, you need to ask the following questions. They’ll help you get into the shoes of your prospective customers so you can create something appealing to get those addresses.

• Why should I give you my email address?

• What is the benefit?

• Is this going to be a bunch of spam?

• Send frequency: How frequent are the emails?

• Will I get discounts?

• Will you send me relevant offers or junk?

Being able to answer these specific questions will be the key to getting subscribers. Simply asking for someone’s email address is not enough.

Segmenting your audience is high on the list of email best practices. Segmentation is the practice of splitting your email list into more targeted groups. This can be extremely helpful when it comes to analytics and post-campaign reflection. It will be clear which groups benefit the most from your emails.

The following are ways to segment a large email list by the kind of subscription people receive:

• Customers only

• Product updates

• Newsletter

• Daily updates (compared to weekly, biweekly, monthly, and so on)

• HTML (some people prefer this option for text-only emails)

One way to master segmentation is by using your CRM to build and segment email lists, as well as import leads for sales. Pair your CRM with your marketing automation software to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout your relationship with subscribers.

To be successful in email marketing, you need to segment and personalize your campaigns for those on your email list. Certain members may want to subscribe to get offers while others may want to read every update you send, even if it’s a few times a week. You must give options.

• Personalization at sign-up: Give people options for what kind of emails they want to receive, and be very clear about how often they will be receiving them. Allow users to specify these preferences during sign-up. This helps users understand what exactly they are agreeing to. In addition, have an option to update their settings or unsubscribe. It may be best to make them aware of this even as early as the welcome emails stage.

• Attempt to unsubscribe: If someone tries to unsubscribe, it may be because they receive too many emails from you. Give people the opportunity to personalize their experience and select the type of emails they want to receive. This can potentially halt that unsubscribe. You can learn more about optimizing your unsubscribe process here.

You want to keep your content fresh. While people may be very interested in the beginning, you need to keep them interested over time. If readers can’t tell what the email is about from the subject line (or headline), they may not open it.

Keep your subject line to 40 characters. People want to know what your email is about before they open it, but they want to get it in a concise, effective format. Subject lines are crucial.

Use promotional emails effectively: You do not want to overwhelm your email list, but you want every email you send to be used effectively. For example, you can promote contests and giveaways in your campaigns to reconnect with inactive subscribers, or send subscribers a poll or survey to find out what type of content they’re most interested in.

When you design your campaign email, use a clear call-to-action button embedded in the format. This way people can easily access your site or take the action you want. Customers should never have to copy and paste an HTML link or search for your site.

For help in building your emails, and to consider all the personalization options, look into Marketing Cloud, which specializes in email marketing automation. It also allows you to engage with messaging, social platforms, and advertisements in a unique way.

The data you receive from each campaign can help you with future lead generation. Figure out and gauge the success of how users have segmented themselves and personalized their experiences. This information can help you launch forward with future campaigns.

Of course, there are many more ways to get more advanced with email marketing. You can, for example, incorporate Salesforce email marketing solutions or email automation. The steps and information in this article are meant to give you a good foundation to build on. As you grow your email marketing, you’ll figure things out and learn what email marketing best practices work for your audience and which metrics are most important for your company’s bottom line.

 <a href="https://www.salesforce.com/hub/marketing/email-marketing-best-practices/" target="_blank"><img src="https://www.salesforce.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/images/hub/marketing/embed.jpg" alt="Email Marketing Best Practices: How to Create a Campaign from Scratch"></a>