How to start an email marketing campaign

Email marketing is a great way for any business to reach its target audience and maintain a relationship with customers and clients. But setting up a campaign from scratch can seem intimidating and overwhelming. Therefore, we have put together some steps to help you get started.

In this guide, we cover: 

• Setting your email campaign objectives
• Keep your target audience in mind
• Building your email list
• Planning and using email marketing tools
• Writing intriguing email subject lines
• Writing your emails 
• Designing your emails
• Creating a clear CTA
• Consistently testing and tracking KPIs

To make the most of your email marketing campaign, you need to decide on its objectives. What do you want to achieve?  Do you want to: 

• Promote a product or service? 
• Nurture your leads? 
• Build a relationship between you and your customers? 

When you have decided on your campaign objectives, you can break them down into more specific targets. 

Some of your targets might include:

• Acquiring 10 new clients by the end of your campaign. 
• Offering an exclusive voucher in an email to generate 10% more sales on your website. 
• Increasing the number of replies you receive to your emails.  

Setting clear goals will make it easier to measure the success of your campaign.

Once you have your objectives and targets set, it’s important to consider who your email campaign is for. How will you get your target audience to engage with your campaign? You can target your campaign by reminding yourself why they signed up for your emails in the first place and what problems they need solutions to. 

For example, if you’re a personal trainer and a visitor to your website signed up to your newsletter to receive healthy meal plans, they will be expecting relevant content related to health and nutrition. 

Segmenting (dividing into groups) your list of contacts makes it a lot easier to send more relevant emails to each individual or company.  Sending hyper-targeted emails makes them more likely to open your emails and possibly even convert. Marketers who used segmented campaigns have noted as much as a 760% increase in revenue. 

There are many ways to segment your audience. For example:  

• Geographical location
• Email engagement
• Company
• Interests  
• Past purchases 

Whichever segments you choose, you have to make sure your content is relevant to the reader. 

There’s no rule for how long your email campaign should last. Every campaign is different. For example, an email campaign reminding a customer of an “abandoned cart” could be two emails. On the other hand, an email campaign promoting an expensive product or course could be between five and ten emails. 

In addition to how many emails you’ll send, you should also decide on how often you’ll send them. You don’t want them too sporadic (sent at random times) or have your emails arriving too quickly after one another. 

There are email marketing tools that will help you to build your email campaigns. These tools allow you to:

• Import contacts
• Design your emails  
• Easily automate your whole campaign. 

Here’s some email marketing tools that are great to help you get started:

• MailChimp: is one of the most well known and easier to use email marketing tools. You can easily import contacts and design beautiful emails that can catch your reader’s eye. Their free plan allows you to send emails to up to two thousand subscribers, making it a great choice if you want to try it out and not commit to anything straight away. 
• Aweber: has been around for over 20 years and they are one of the best tools to help you get started. They make it easy to set up simple yet effective landing pages along with amazing emails. You can send your emails to up to five hundred subscribers for free.  Their paid plans are also very affordable too. 
•  MailerLite: is another great affordable option. Even with their free plan, you can automate a lot of your email marketing. Their interface is user-friendly which makes it great for beginners to start email marketing. With their free plan, you can send emails to up to one thousand subscribers and they also have affordable premium plans which unlock a variety of useful features. 

You can also plan follow-up emails that depend on the actions the reader took while reading the previous email. A lot of providers have plenty of templates to help you get started. The next part is writing your subject lines. 

Subject lines are vital when it comes to email marketing campaigns. They’re often the deciding factor whether your email gets opened or not. In fact, 47% of email recipients open an email based on the subject line alone. The goal of the subject line is to intrigue the reader enough to make them want to read a bit further. 

You can write compelling subject lines by; promising something valuable, using personalisation and creating a sense of curiosity. Once you have your subject lines, it’s time to start writing and designing your emails. 

The next thing you need to do is provide your readers with a reason to click on one of the links in your email by using text or images to get their interest. 

There’s no need to write an essay of words when creating your emails. Your readers will likely receive hundreds of emails so it’s best to keep them short, easy to read and relatable. Find their pain points and provide solutions, educate or entertain them. 

Try adding some images to your emails to help explain your product or service and improve your email campaign’s engagement rate. 

A lot of businesses make the mistake of adding too many calls to action (or CTA) to their email campaigns. Having one clear CTA with what the reader can expect when they click on it is much more effective and causes less confusion for them. 

You’re finally ready to send your email campaign. Once you’ve sent your emails, the final step of the process is to start testing and measuring the results of your campaign.  What went well and what needs some work? 

A lot of email marketing tools also allow you to A/B  test almost everything. You can change the layout, CTA, colour scheme, email copy, subject lines and imagery to determine which is more effective. 

The main metrics you will then want to track is the open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribes and forwards, as these will be the key indicators of a successful email marketing campaign.  

While you’re focusing on building your email marketing campaign, you can use the CountingUp app to save time on tedious accounting tasks. The Countingup app and business current account make your bookkeeping easy by automating complex tax and accounting tasks so that you can spend more time running your business. Find out more here.