A clever email campaign is still one of the best digital marketing resources – and still the most rewarding in terms of ROI. As a matter of fact, and in spite of the growth of social media and instant messaging apps, email marketing keeps being a successful and priceless way to nurture the relationship with your clients.
When aptly built, an email campaign strategy is not simply a series of commercial offers blasted to a number of accounts: on the contrary, it’s a powerful mean of conversational marketing.
But here’s the question, then: how to set up a good email campaign?
And here’s the answer, in seven simple tips:
1. Design great opt-in forms.
Before thinking about your newsletter, you should think about how to best entice possible readers and collect their addresses. The most effective way is to craft an elegant and clear opt-in or double opt-in form and embed it into your website. Emailchef provides a beautiful drag-and-drop editor to help you do that in seconds: try it now!
2. Keep your lists clean.
This is an underestimated and very simple best practice that will enhance your campaign immediately. You only need to erase all misspelled, wrong or double addresses. Emailchef automatically searches for duplicates and provides a tool for a test that verifies the number of bounces etc. A series of chart will display all data clearly.
3. Craft a brand-related template.
Your email layout should provide an enjoyable reading experience, and always be coherent with your brand and website design: after all, it’s a part of a broader marketing strategy. Oh, and always remember to add a one-click unsubscribe link; it’s both necessary to comply with the CAN-SPAM act and to avoid to end up in the junk folder because your users cannot opt-out.
4. Put extra attention to the subject line.
Tired of ordinary subject lines such as “Great offer for you” or “Newsletter n. 53”? We are tired too. So – apart from the obvious precautions of not including spammy stuff such as “$$” or “viagra” – please try to be more creative.
Some advices: keep it short (less than 60 characters); evoke rather than describe the email content; don’t try to be too “pushy”; absolutely avoid exclamation marks and all caps; set expectations (that must be filled by the email, of course). For more tips, you can check our article about subject line best practices.
5. Rely on a professional email sending platform.
All the previous work is useless if you don’t choose a dedicated and reliable email marketing service like Emailchef – of course. Our platform will guarantee a fast sending process and, above all, a safe delivery for all your emails. (Apart from a lot of other cool stuff, of course).
6. Segment your list and create tailor-made offers.
Why send only one type of newsletter to all your list? One of the most fruitful tactics of advanced email marketing is to segment the database according to some categories – for instance age, gender, interests, location etc. – and then craft tailor-made emails accordingly.
How to collect this information? Step back to suggestion n. 1 and add some fields to your sign-up form! Emailchef provides handy ready-made fields and related tags to integrate the obtained data in your newsletter. Simple as that.
7. Analyze.
No email campaign is born perfect. So always analyze carefully all the results – click-through rate, open rate, number of unsubscribers etc. With Emailchef’s statistics dashboard you can do that in a breeze: all the metrics collected will be a huge help to improve your next newsletters. Because this is the core of good marketing: always test and improve.
