EMAIL MARKETING CAMPAIGN: FROM ZERO TO HERO

According to the Radicati Group Study, there will be more than 3.8 billion email users before the start of 2019, which means over half of the entire planet uses email right now. Marketers and businesses know the power of email, so developing and implementing a successful email marketing campaign is a key initiative, being discussed behind boardrooms.

A successful email marketing campaign can bring brand agreement, converts subscriber to purchase products or influence activity.

Email Marketing can provide businesses measurable revenues so there is every reason to create outstanding email marketing campaigns and hire the best marketers to craft that perfect email for your business.

Great marketing campaigns start with ready access to your marketing data and what better way to monitor these metrics than via your inbox courtesy of Pocket Insights.

Download the Infographic below.

Email Marketing Campaign

While email marketing is considered to be one of the most powerful sales generators, there are more ways in which a business can benefit including:

• Personalized approach- Well implemented targeting and segmentation help businesses build a more personalized communication strategy.  Personalized Emails have better open rates and generate more revenue.  Recipients do not feel like “Your next  Subscriber”, they feel like the email was created only for them.
• Brand Loyalty- Giving out valuable and engaging emails regularly will have a positive impact on brand perception. People will be excited to receive emails from you because they know you deliver quality content regularly.
• Customers prefer emails- According to the research of Marketing Sherpa, 72% of adults in the US prefer companies to communicate with them via email.  This was the only digital channel to outperform Direct Mail (48%) and TV ads (34%).
• Customer retention- Staying in constant contact with those who have somehow interacted with your business (purchases or sign up for newsletters, etc.) increases your chances to convert them into on regular or seasonal purchases.
• Plan, Deploy, Analyze, Repeat- Email marketing campaigns are the most easily measurable ones. Most ESPs provide detailed reporting, with necessary benchmarks, timing and tracking data. One can easily identify the most engaging content, hot hours, and top clicks. Analyze all the data and update your campaigns and templates accordingly.

Successful email marketing starts with a list of subscribers that you have collected through web form submissions, purchases, sweepstakes or business acquisition. Growing your email list organically is always the preferred method than buying a list. Email list management requires regular list maintenance whether it’s cleaning your list quarterly with an email verification service or implementing a verification API on your web form, which allows for real-time verification at the point of entry. This helps prevent bots, typo traps, email threats, and invalid entries to be added to your email list.

3 signs of good quality emails list

• Good Email Lists are Permission Based

Emails ideally should only be sent to verified subscribers who want to read the latest and greatest about your company’s products and news.  These subscribers trust the information you provide via emails and have permitted you to send them newsletters and offers.

• Acquire Emails Organically

A good email list is built through web forms, special discounts, purchases, sweepstake and business acquisitions.  If you’re thinking about purchasing a list, be prepared to deal with serious consequences such as being blocked and blacked listed by ISP’s and mail monitoring systems like SpamHaus or SpamCop.   The cost alone to repair your email deliverability and sending reputation will always be greater than a purchased email list.

• Verified and Validated

Maintaining your email list is one of the most important aspects of email marketing. Having invalid, duplicates, typo and incorrect emails in your list will directly impact your sender reputation. This will affect the overall KPIs of your campaign. Considering a reliable and secure email validation service for regular list hygiene purposes is the most effective way to keep your emails valid and clean.

How to Increase Sender Reputation

A score that an Internet Service Provider (ISP) assigns to an organization that deploys emails’ is referred to as a sender reputation. The higher your Sender Reputation is, the higher the chances of getting into “Inbox” are.

You need a good sender reputation when you are sending out large quantities of emails because your ISP can block you.  As a good business practice, you should regularly clean your email list to reduce the number of invalid or inactive emails to reduce hard bounces.  Send to the most engaged subscribers and throttle your deliverability.  One of the most popular methods to verify emails is through account level verification, where you verify an email is valid or invalid without deploying an email address.  Lastly, you can send out a confirmation email so you can tell if the email is from a bot or a human.

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Choose the perfect ESP (Email Service Provider)

An ESP is an email marketing platform that allows you to send bulk and segmented email messages.   An ESP will provide several features and functionality to make your email marketing a breeze. Those features include customizable mobile-responsive email templates, contact management, form building, email automation, and reporting tools.  Well known email service provider companies include MailChimp, Constant Contact, CampaignMonitor, Benchmark Email, SalesForce Marketing Cloud, Bronto, Emarsys and Adobe Campaign.

Whenever looking for your future ESP, consider the following:

• Integration- You may want your platform (website and/or CRM system) to be synced with ESP lists automatically.
• User-friendly interface- You will need to create and analyze campaigns quickly and easily. So the simpler the interface, the more operative your processes will be.
• Deliverability rates and monitoring- It is not enough to just hit the send button. You need to ensure that your email campaigns are being delivered. Look for providers’ deliverability rates, ask for any related information.
• Template builder and library- Writing your own HTML coded email may be timely and consuming. Thus having a drag and drop builder as well as a large library of email templates is a must.
• You will need to research some other criteria, such as segmentation, tracking, and a/b testing options, based on your needs and goals.

Reduce Hard and Soft Bounce rates

For any email marketing campaign, one of the more important aspects is reviewing your bounces, opens, clicks and purchase metrics.

For bounces, there are two common types: hard bounces and soft bounces. Generally, a hard bounce means a permanent error, or that the email isn’t good for the foreseeable future.  A soft bounce means a temporary error and sometimes after a few sends a soft bounce can be turned into a valid email or a hard bounce.

It is highly recommended to monitor bounce rates weekly.

Email Validation Services like EmailOversight, are created to help you reduce the number of bounce backs.

Typo’d, abandoned accounts, bots, and invalid form entries are how email list(s) become littered with various email threats. This can be prevented by implementing a verification API on the front end of your web forms. With some ESP’s you can simply implement a web service API script or a java-script to serve as was to help eliminate those emails.

When the verification API is applied on your sight, inbound emails are immediately screened for email threats, syntax, valid MX Domain, spam traps, and account-level verification is performed. Not only will an email validation service reduce bounce rates in your campaign, but other benefits include:

• Improve click-through rate
• Users will be alerted they’ve entered an invalid email
• Better deliverability rates
• Reduce the cost of sending email campaigns
• Save you the time of cleaning your list manually
• Eliminate Bot attacks on your forms

How to design an email template

Your email marketing newsletter should be a clever combination of words and images. The entire design should be pleasing to the eye and reflect your business brand. You can make an email template design to be used in all your email newsletters. A good email template should include your logo, a space for the product description or message and an area where you can put images relevant to your message.

• Personalized

You must add a personal touch to your emails by using your subscriber’s name. You must add some graphics to capture the attention of your readers.  Pictures convey more than a thousand words.

• Mobile friendly

You should design an email that can be viewed decently on any platform or device. There are now more than 3 billion users of smartphones. Expect some of your subscribers to view your email on their mobile so it should look good on these devices.

• Good Formatting

A good template should have good formatting. Text alignment and proper spacing should be designed to be pleasing to the eye. You need to design the headers and the body copy all accordingly to the goals of your email marketing campaign.
All the above-mentioned points also will help you to avoid mistakes in email marketing.

Email marketing statistics and KPIs

You need to know how your email marketing is performing after all you have probably spent hours planning and coming up with good copy and designing the images. You should know your email marketing stats and some tools can help you.

Average Open Rate

The average open rate is a KPI that measures how many recipients opened your email in comparison with the total numbers of emails delivered within a campaign. You can get this data from your ESPs report.

Learn more about how to increase your email marketing campaign’s open rate in our recent blog post

Average Click-through rate

The click-through rate is the number of users who access your website via the hyperlinks on your newsletter or email. You can find the exact average click-through rate from your ESP.

Here’s how to calculate your CTR:

CTR = (Total Clicks/ Opened email) x 100

Number of Unsubscribed users

As a campaign manager, you need to understand how many users unsubscribe from your list. Researching their profiles will help you understand how these users appeared in your list, what was the user’s experience with your business and why they unsubscribed.

Email marketing is an essential medium to engage with customers and potential prospects.   It offers the ability to advertise products and services your business provides. An email will continue to dominate as we enter a paperless world. People will come to depend on their email inbox to get messages and tailored marketing from their favorite brands and companies. Email marketers should provide relevant content to maintain a loyal base. Good corporate practices ensure that emails reach their target audience and they can do this by maintaining their reputation and adhering to best practices.