Kevin George — June 24, 2019 — June 24, 2019
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At the heart of an effective email marketing strategy lies carefully considered “email campaign management”. Without proper campaign management, your email strategy will be like a punctured tyre that does not get you anywhere. Email campaign management consists of diverse interlocking activities that range from building an email list through lead generation tactics to designing and coding an email to its timely deployment. Every task conforms to intricate practices that should be followed for its flawless execution.
If you are an amateur email marketer, we have put together the different steps in the campaign management process, which will help you execute your email strategy better.
Ascertain the email purpose
Here are some questions that you should ask, to determine the purpose of your email campaigns:
- “What are you looking to achieve through this email campaign?
- “Do you want to promote a new product?”
- “Are you trying to build brand loyalty?”
The answers that you get, will let you know whether you want to:
- Create brand awareness
- Increase open-rates and reach more people
- Generate website traffic by improving click-through rates
- Get brand evangelists and building customer loyalty
- Increase conversions and drive business growth
Suppose you are looking forward to creating brand awareness through the email campaigns. In such cases, the email campaigns will primarily focus on building trust and nurturing the leads, rather than showcasing the products and persuading them to buy.
Email Campaign Production and Deployment
To make email campaign production easily comprehensible, we shall break it into 9 simple steps.
Planning it right
To make sure things are on track, it is recommended you have a detailed email calendar at your disposal. It will help you avoid the last-minute hustle or procrastination by setting the right timeline. Before planning a calendar, decide on the number of emails that should be sent.
The calendar should serve as a document that communicates the purpose, goals, and target audience of every email campaign along with the deployment date. It is advisable to have a yearly calendar and a monthly update regarding all the emails that are planned.
Building a list
The fuel that propels the vehicle of email marketing is an email list. You should work on a well-designed landing page or opt-in form that serves as a lead magnet and offers something valuable to the user in exchange for the email address. Make sure the landing page conveys the message clearly because visitors judge a website within 50 milliseconds once they land on it.
Here’s a schematic representation that can help you build better landing pages.
To sum it up, as the intent and interest of the lead increases, you have better opportunities to collect personal information from the subscriber.
Rather than having a single landing page asking “everything” to the subscriber at one go, it is recommended you ask questions in installments based on the user engagement.
Segmenting the email list
Blasting an email to the entire subscriber list is not enough. It is important to send the right message to the right person, and this is possible through email list segmentation. Segment the email list based on every detail available—demographics, geographical location, past purchases, total purchase value, frequency of purchase, etc. This is important to send targeted and more relevant emails to the subscribers. For example: Mother’s Day is celebrated on different dates in US and UK. Segmentation based on geographical location will help you send the right email to the right people at the right time.
Preparing the Email Copy
Once you have a calendar, you pretty well know the next email that you have to work on. Conceptualize the theme and draft an interesting as well as relevant email copy. Based on those metrics, write a suitable subject line, From name and copy of the email.
Designing and Coding the Email
Pass on the document to the email design team after the final approval from the concerned professional. The concept and design idea should be shared with the email designer. While designing an email, you should take into account the coding limitations and also design an appropriate fallback with suitable alt-text for the non-supportive email clients.
Subsequently, after the design approval, the email coding team comes into picture. The coded email should be pixel perfect and render well on every device and email clients.
Testing the Email
Every email coded must be carefully tested. It should be checked for the links and be free from any bugs. Every link and CTA should redirect the user to the right page.
EmailMonks checks the HTML version of the email thrice before deploying it- once by the reviewer, next by the team leader, and finally by the project coordinator.
Test the email on tools such as Litmus and Email on Acid.
Deploying the Email and Analyzing Metrics
The FINAL (approved) email is integrated in the ESP of your choice and checked across the major email clients and different devices with various screen sizes before deployment. This ensures that there are no rendering issues, regardless of the device or email client on which the subscriber views the email. In case there’s still an issue, it has to be fixed before the deployment.
Only after the email is meticulously checked, it should be sent to the specific segment at the scheduled time and day.
Of course, the email marketer’s task does not end at this. They have to constantly keep a track of the email metrics like open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, unsubscribes, and time spent on an email. If there is a sharp dip in any of the metrics, you should make the required changes. For example: Work on creating better CTAs and place them more strategically if the click-through rate is constantly dwindling.
Optimizing the Campaigns and Email List
Email marketing professionals should stay abreast with the industry updates besides the performance of the email campaigns. These learnings should be used to optimize and keep the freshness alive in the email campaigns.
Over a period of time, the email subscribers are likely to go dormant and stop engaging with the emails. Such inactive subscribers who have not engaged with the emails in 90 days should be targeted with a series of reengagement emails. If they still show no activity, they should be removed so that you can maintain a clean list with good email deliverability. You should remove the hard bounces and invalid addresses of subscribers and update their email addresses, if available.
Automating the Email Campaigns
You might have to automate the email campaigns and set a workflow of triggered emails. Let’s say you are a player in the e-commerce industry. You can set email automation for product recommendations, cart abandonment emails, or reengagement emails for them in addition to the mandatory transactional emails – order confirmation, shipping notification, and delivery confirmation.
Wrapping Up
Most of people use email marketing and email campaign management interchangeably. It is important to understand that email campaign management is a part of email marketing – the most indispensable part. Effective email marketing is only possible if you have efficient campaign management in place.
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