Getting Started With Email Marketing Campaign

Do you all remember the first email account that you opened? I don’t remember but it was something weird for sure! Anyway, let me tell you an interesting fact. There are 3x more email accounts than Facebook accounts! 

You may have seen reports that ‘Email has the highest ROI of any marketing channel available’. From my experience of 1 year serving as a Lead of Email Marketing at 10 Minute School, I can assure you this claim is not wrong. So, if you want to learn how to set up an email marketing campaign, I got your back! In this blog, I will explain how to set up an email marketing campaign step by step and the tools that will help you! 

Before we deep dive into the email marketing process, you can read my other blog to learn the basics of email marketing. 

Email Marketing Guide for Beginners (raiyaan.me)

What is Email marketing?

Email marketing is a direct marketing channel where you reach your customers directly. It is a form of marketing where a media buyer or business sends an email to a potential customer with its new products, sales, and updates. Think of it as a key part of your marketing automation strategy, keeping your leads and customers in the loop and excited about what you have in store for them.

Email Marketing Goals

• Building relationships through personalized engagement
• For sharing relevant blog content or valuable assets with your prospects
• Promoting your products and services
• Giving different updates on the business or brand
• Offering your customers content that can help them succeed in their goals
• Engaging the customer with the brand 

Getting Started with Email Marketing 

I will provide you with an easy step-by-step guide to getting started with email marketing. 

1. Select Your Campaign Goal 

Before jumping into any tool for starting a campaign, decide your campaign goal. Ask yourself some questions like-

• What are the goals I want to achieve from this campaign?
• What content type it will be?
• How will you measure the success? 

Some typical Campaign Goals include: 

• Driving website traffic
• Increasing sales online or in-person 
• Promoting products or services
• Welcoming new members
• Sending news
• Requesting donations
• Requesting user-generated content to highlight online
• Requesting positive customer reviews from satisfied customers

Email should be an important component of every digital marketing plan because of its effectiveness in driving conversions and building brand loyalty. Planning what you want to achieve with email before you start sending makes it much easier to identify what to send and who to send it to, and helps you create focused, high-performing email campaigns that will achieve your marketing goals.

2. Define Your Target Audience

You have to define the target audience to whom you want to reach through emails, build their persona, and segment them. 

The more relevant an email is to someone, the more likely they are to open and engage with it. 

Here are some examples of ways to segment your audience:

• Geography
• Demographics
• Past purchases
• Buyer behavior
• Expressed interests
• Email Engagement

3. Build your email list 

When you design an email campaign, you need a list of email addresses of your audience. Hence, you have to make an email list. An email list (we’ll cover how to build your email list in the next section) is a group of users who have permitted you to send them relevant content.

There are a couple of different ways you can build your email list, but the right method for each campaign depends on the goals you establish in Step 1

List of Known Contacts

If you aim to use an email campaign to keep in touch with existing customers, you have to import known contacts with whom you want to interact. You can manually upload them or you can connect any software like MailChimp or Campaign Monitor where your customer data lives (such as your CRM, accounting, eCommerce tool, and hundreds of others) and automatically sync your customer information into your Campaign Monitor or Mailchimp account. 

Build a new list from scratch

If you plan to use email to communicate with an audience whose email address you might not have yet, then you’ll need to start capturing email addresses and building your list from scratch.

You can collect email addresses from other sources or provide incentives to the customer to give you email addresses. 

4. Select the type of email campaigns you want to send

The third step is to select the email marketing type. There are different types of email marketing. 

9 types of Email Marketing- 

1. Welcome Emails
2. Newsletters
3. Lead Nurturing Emails
4. Dedicated Emails
5. Transactional Emails
6. Abandoned Cart Emails
7. Education Emails
8. Event Invitation Emails
9. Survey or Feedback Emails

I have discussed all the types here in another blog. Check it out. Email Marketing Guide for Beginners (raiyaan.me)

5. Make a schedule 

Decide the schedule when you want to send the customers the emails. Figure out the best timing for the campaigns. Why this is important? Suppose, you are sending an email at a time when your customer tends to be busy or sleeping time, and most likely your email can be ignored. Plus, fix the frequency of your emails. Frequent emails can bore the receiver. So, a proper schedule is important. 

6. Decide the success metrics 

It is important to decide the metrics by which you will decide if the campaign was successful or not. Being meticulous about every key metric will help you make small changes to your emails, yielding large results.

7. Choose an email marketing tool

The next important step is to choose an email marketing platform. You have decided your campaign goals, built your persona, and decided the success metrics. It’s time to select the email marketing platform. These email marketing tools can increase your efficiency and craft beautiful campaigns.