Designing a successful email marketing campaign strategy is one of the most cost-effective forms of digital marketing. Effective email marketing strategies can provide an ROI of up to $36:1, which is why 73% of B2B marketers say it’s their top channel for connecting with potential buyers.
In this article, we share nine email tips and techniques to help you design an effective email marketing strategy and maximize your profit.
1. Fill your email list with your target audience
Getting the right email subscribers to join your email list is the first step in your sales funnel. Any effective email marketing strategy requires a sizable email list.
Many companies and small businesses use promotional offers, coupons or sign-up discounts as incentives to attract new subscribers.
Giving your potential customers offers and rewards is an excellent way to drive sales. Always offer something relevant to your product in return for their email address.
Optimizing your sign-up forms is essential here. Only collect relevant information: a name and an email address. Any more than that, the opt-in process becomes a barrier preventing new customers from signing up.
If you want a successful marketing campaign, you must inform new subscribers of your emails’ purpose.
For example, you should try to answer the following questions in your email landing page or welcome email copy:
What do your customers or potential customers get after sharing their email addresses?
Will you offer beta trials to your followers?
What kind of emails will you be sending?
Will you also engage with your audience over social media?
How often will you send emails?
Will you send them great offers, special discount codes and free trial products?
Simply posting “share your email” often doesn’t get marketers and business owners far enough. You need to explain the benefits. Your visitors are about to share personal information, so you must offer them something in return.
2. Practice email list hygiene
When was the last time you cleaned up your contacts? Email list hygiene ensures that everyone on your list is still an active contact and wants to open your emails.
Deleting contacts who haven’t opened emails in a while can be painful. Still, it positively impacts your email deliverability and bounce rate – and influences whether your emails get lost in promotion tabs or get caught by spam filters.
The higher email metrics like your bounce rate are, the less effective your email marketing efforts will be in helping you achieve your marketing goals.
For example, if you email monthly, you could filter your contacts and email clients who haven’t opened an email in the last year and ask if they still want to hear from you. If they do, get them to click on an interactive element of your email, such as a button or a survey, to keep them on the list.
If they’re not interested, they can delete the email and you can set up an automation to remove them from your subscriber list after a set number of days.
3. Use email automation
Many content marketing professionals incorrectly assume email automation means you can’t send personalized emails, which is perhaps why only 65% of email marketers use automated emails.
On the contrary, most email marketing platforms allow you to personalize automated emails with names, locations and other list segmentation variables (we’ll discuss this in more detail in a moment).
Using automated email sequences in your email strategy lets you stay in touch with your subscribers without manually managing every email campaign, saving you valuable time and resources.
When you’re ready to announce new products or sales, your subscribers will be engaged and eager to receive your promotional email.
Always schedule your automation templates in advance and stick to the email frequency you promised in your welcome email. If you find yourself asking, “Should I send this email?” you may want to refrain from sending it. Send limited but valuable emails to avoid overwhelming your subscribers, particularly when using automation.
Start planning your email marketing campaign now
How to automate emails in Pipedrive
Pipedrive has powerful email marketing tools to help you manage your email list. One of those tools is automation. Discover how to automate emails in Campaigns by Pipedrive in the video below:
4. Personalize emails
Personalization can keep your audience coming back for more. It’s not just about adding a recipient’s name to an email but also about tailoring the email to their customer experience so they can get the most from your product or service and you can nurture the customer relationship.
Netflix, for example, recommends shows and films to users based on what they’ve watched previously. Doing so encourages users to return to the platform and could positively impact churn, especially for a streaming service with so much content that it can be hard to decide what to watch.
The email also asks users to rate something they watched recently. When a user rates their recent watch, Netflix tailors its algorithm to users to offer better future recommendations.
5. Optimize email frequency
Sending the optimal number of emails is fundamental to a great email campaign. It increases call-to-action CTA effectiveness and boosts conversion rates because your subscribers are looking forward to receiving your email. There’s a fine line between sending too many emails and losing touch with your target audience.
At the start of your email sequence, we recommend explicitly stating how many emails your subscribers can expect to receive from you in a given timeframe (e.g., weekly, biweekly, monthly). You can do this with the welcome email, as it sets email deliverability expectations, gives you a concrete metric to work towards and helps schedule promotional offers alongside your other marketing channels.
For example, an onboarding sequence may look something like this:
Day one – Welcome email
Day three – Product tip one
Day five – Product tip two
Day seven – Product tip three
Here’s an example of a welcome email from Slack. It covers the basics of getting started without overwhelming the new user with features or tips.
Understanding when to schedule your emails depends on your subscribers. Use A/B tests within email marketing tools to take your marketing automation efforts to the next level. Analyze email open rates and gauge when your subscribers will most likely engage with your emails.
Good email campaigns also leverage different types of emails to optimize their marketing efforts. These include:
Welcome emails
Transactional emails
Each email has a different objective, such as conversions, brand awareness, re-engagement campaigns or enhancing customer loyalty.
6. Collect and segment relevant data
Collecting relevant data and segmenting subscriber demographic details is an essential email marketing technique. Data points to collect include:
Gender
Age
Employment status
Personal relationship status
Religious affiliation
Hobbies/general interests
Collecting this data enables you to segment your target audience into targeted mailing lists (otherwise known as list segmentation). In turn, this allows you to send different email content and email types to segmented subscribers, improving your email strategy’s effectiveness and profitability.
Sending a survey to your subscribers is one way to collect this information. A survey also encourages subscribers to interact with your emails, which can increase engagement with current and future email content. Consistent interaction makes readers more likely to click when you send a promotional email.
Your list may be small right now, but as your enterprise grows, so will your subscriber number – and your ability to segment your list and drive sales via your email campaign strategy.
7. Analyze and compare
From the beginning of your email marketing campaign, you should use email marketing tools to analyze the key elements in your email marketing strategy, including:
Email open rates
Number of inactive subscribers
Once gathered, you can compare these data points to your predefined key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure progress and see if you’re on par to hit your objectives.
You can also use tools to track:
What emails and types of emails drive sales
How many emails it takes someone to make a purchase
The subject lines that are the most effective for promotional emails
The more data you have, the more you can improve the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy.
Once you’re in the hundreds or thousands of subscribers, it’s time to consider list segmentation and email segmentation to get even more from your email marketing efforts.
8. A/B split test everything
If your messages have a poor open rate, it’s likely your email subject lines or the contents of your emails aren’t resonating with your subscribers.
Analyzing email open rates and A/B testing different email subject lines fixes this problem as it allows you to set metrics for improvement and identify which subject lines work for your subscribers.
If your click-through rate isn’t meeting your expectations, then your email copy isn’t optimized for conversions. Consider using words and language that better resonate with your target audience personas.
The best email copy successfully directs your email subscribers to your landing page, where you can encourage them toward profitable action. Email analytics provides insight into what’s going wrong in a campaign and what you need to change to get things on the right track again.
Note: Split testing one element per email will help you measure its effectiveness in isolation, so you don’t have to consider other factors affecting the results. To get the most from A/B tests, run them as often as possible because there will always be something new you can learn about your subscribers and how they interact with your email campaigns.
9. Ensure your emails are mobile-friendly
Last but certainly not least, you must ensure your emails display correctly on mobile devices.
Case studies reveal that in 2021, 41.6% of emails were viewed on mobile devices, so having the correct mobile email design and email templates is imperative for a profitable email marketing campaign.
For example, this email newsletter from e-commerce agency Ask Phill is built to be readable and engaging on a mobile phone screen.
You may lose many subscribers if an email looks great on a desktop but distorted on mobiles.
However, there are some things you can do to ensure your email designs are mobile-friendly, including:
Keeping the design simple. The more formatting you add to your email, the more likely elements will work on some devices but not others.
Shrinking images. Smaller images load faster, making them more friendly to those using data or slower internet connections.
Sending a test email. Always check how your email looks on different devices before sending, particularly if using multiple formatting elements like boxes, tables or images.
Checking your font color. Some phones and laptops now go into night mode automatically during certain hours. Ensure users can still read your emails by setting the font color to automatic. Otherwise, if you set the font to black but don’t change the email background color, users may be unable to read it without changing their screen settings or highlighting the text.
Consider mobile devices when designing email marketing campaigns, whether your target audience is B2B or B2C. Making your emails mobile-friendly ensures everyone can enjoy them, and your email marketing strategy can continue to drive sales regardless of where someone reads your email content.
Final thoughts
Using these email campaign tips you can get more from your email marketing strategy. The fundamentals of designing a successful email marketing strategy involve knowing your audience, providing them with value, analyzing your email metrics and making changes to optimize your campaign performance.
