What is an Email Marketing Campaign?
The Prep Work
1. Know Your Goals
All good marketing starts with setting goals, and email marketing’s no different. To run a successful email marketing campaign, think about what you want to achieve. Typical goals for an email marketing campaign include:
● Welcoming new subscribers and telling them about your business and values so you start to build a relationship with them.
● Boosting engagement with your contentand your business,whether that’s promoting a webinar or trying to make an initial sale.
● Nurturing existing subscribers by providing something they’ll value.
● Re-engaging subscribers who haven’t been particularly active.
● Segmenting your subscribers so you can send more targeted email marketing campaigns.
You can also set email marketing goals according to your conversion goals.
1. Understand Email Types
It’s also important to understand the different types of email that you can send. People group these in different ways, but here are the three key email types.
We’re all familiar with promotional emails, which talk about offers and sales and are self-promotional.
Then there are relational emails, which give subscribers what you’ve promised, like a weekly newsletter, a free gift, relevant information they can use, and so on.
There are also transactional emails, which include:
● Subscriber signup confirmations
● 
Welcome messages
● Order or purchase confirmations
● Acknowledgements of changes to subscriber information
Transactional emails are usually triggered by subscribers’ actions and relate to an action they’ve taken on your site.
Now that you know the types of email you can send, it’s time to move onto the next step to create a successful email marketing campaign.
2. Know Your Audience
If you’ve been doing email marketing for a while, you’ll likely know who your audience is. If you’re just getting started, you’ll have to make some educated guesses so you can target your content. Don’t worry; you’ll start collecting subscriber info the minute you send your first campaign, so next time round, you’ll have real data to work with.
In the meantime, gather data from Google Analytics and your social media profiles, like the Facebook Insights data.
Both sources have data on demographics, location, and interests, plus a bunch of other metrics, that’ll give you a snapshot of who your customers are and what they’re interested in. That’s a good starting point for crafting successful email marketing campaigns.
10 Tips For Successful Email Marketing Campaigns
1. Choose an email automation tool that fits the size of your marketing team.
Many of the more robust products really need a staff person at the reins. If you can't afford someone in that position, then turn your attention toward simpler software that requires little overhead.
2. Use a third party tool instead of Outlook.
You really need an unsubscribe button to give recipients the opportunity to opt out, and Outlook doesn't have that.
In some countries you might otherwise be breaking the law, such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR).
3. Protect personally identifiable information.
Use strong passwords with the service you use and never sell that information unless your privacy policy explicitly states you can (and even then it's still probably a bad idea)
4. Don't take yourself tooseriously.
Boring, dry emails get old fast and people will almost invariably unsubscribe (except your competitors).
Be yourself, be conversational and feel free to poke fun at yourself every now and then. This makes your organization a little more human. And it makes your job more fun.
1. Automate syncing contacts with your CRM.
Loading or syncing your contacts from your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool can be labor intensive and can cause technical misfires that end up adding people who have unsubscribed back in, or sending people duplicate emails.
Instead, whenever possible, choose a tool that has a plug-in or integration with existing tools you use at your organization.
2. Use email automation to cross-sell goods and services.
If you've already converted a lead to a customer then you will have the ability to potentially sell them other items in your portfolio.
Don't be too salesy, but do have multiple campaigns - those for prospects at each stage of the sales funnel and those for organizations who are already customers at various maturity levels - so the content is fresh and pertinent to them.
3. Use email automation to communicate more than just a sales pitch.
Don't use email just to hawk products. Send surveys or thought leadership content such as an interesting industry report to stay engaged with customers, as long as you don't do it too often.
4. Be timely.
If it's tax season, for example, tell customers and leads how your product can help them file their return. If it's April, talk about spring cleaning. If they've been a customer for three months, check in to see how they're doing.
5. 
Have a call to action.
Let's say you sent that email timed to tax season. Have a button with a call to action.
A great way achieve this is to coordinate a blog post and have a "Read more" button, and then a call to action within that post.
The longer you can keep a prospect's or customer's attention, the more likely they are to buy your product and stay with you.
6. Pay attention to when people unsubscribe.
This is simple - stop doing whatever it is you're doing that made them unsubscribe.
Remember, if people are clicking, you're succeeding. If they're not clicking and they're unsubscribing, you're not! Email can be a very powerful tool for interacting with customers - as long as you do it right.
As technology changes and strategies evolve, being one step ahead will ensure you continue to drive your business forward.
Implementing these key steps within your campaigns for 2019 will allow you to create emails that resonate well with your customers. You’ll be able to provide them with a one-of-a-kind experience that skyrockets your email marketing results.
And better results mean better revenue for your company and who doesn’t want to start 2019 with that?
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