What is an email marketing campaign?
An email marketing campaign is a scheduled series of emails used to nurture leads and current customers to encourage engagement and increase sales. Each individual email leads to a specific call-to-action, i.e. getting users to sign up, book a call, continue reading, or add a product to their cart.
Email campaigns are an important part of inbound marketing, an ongoing process and philosophy where marketers meet buyers in whatever stage of the journey they're in.
Inbound marketing acknowledges that not everyone is ready to buy from you at this exact moment, which is why email is such an important channel. It helps you stay top-of-mind by providing communication to their personal inbox.
Email marketing isn’t an invitation to send emails with reckless abandon, though. You always want to make sure every email offers something of value to whoever ends up reading it (because this is how you can nurture a conversion) and that all recipients have opted in to receive emails from you — there’s nothing worse than being an unwelcome guest.
Effective Email Marketing Campaigns
An email marketing campaign is as effective as its ultimate goal. Here are some examples of different purposes your email campaign may set out to accomplish:
Traffic Generation Campaigns
One of the biggest benefits of email marketing? Getting click-throughs to pages on your website.
In fact, 45.2% of marketers listed generating web traffic as one of the primary objectives of their email marketing campaign, according to our most recent email marketing survey.
Email marketing boost your referral traffic and drives visitors who’ve already shown an interest in your business, making it more likely that they’ll act once they get to your site.
Overall, email is an effective promotion channel for the high-value content you create on your website. It can help you drive qualified traffic to your product pages, blog posts, and web pages, consequently boosting conversions.
Awareness Campaigns
43.9% of marketers in our survey listed increasing brand awareness as one of the primary objectives of their email strategy. As luck would have it, brand awareness email campaigns help you solve for your readers and also establish yourself as a leader in your industry.
Not everyone who opts into your email list is ready to make a purchase, so email marketing helps you stay top of mind while and provide the educational content that is most relevant to them.
If subscribers hear more from you than your competitors, they’re more likely to rely on you when they need more information on a topic — or when they need a certain product.
Lead Nurturing Campaigns
When you identify leads with the highest purchase intent, lead nurturing campaigns help you provide conversion-focused content that "nurtures" them toward a sale (or at least toward becoming sales-ready).
In these emails, you can be more up-front about wanting recipients to buy. You can include shopping-centric calls-to-action, such as “Shop now,” “Buy now,” and “Add to cart.”
However, it’s essential for recipients to have shown strong purchase intent. Those who have added items to their cart, abandoned a purchase, or have a purchase history with your business strongly indicate an intent to purchase and might be perfect candidates for nurturing emails.
RISE Tip:
If you send nurturing emails to casual visitors or first-time subscribers, we’d bet they might feel rushed or inadvertently discouraging them from buying from you. Instead, use your services to find behavioral and purchasing data before launching a targeted campaign.
Revenue Generation Campaign
According to our survey, 57.8% of marketers listed increasing revenue as one of the main objectives of their email marketing strategy.
Those 57.8% of marketers would be happy to know that you can easily drive revenue with existing customers with email marketing campaigns by promoting upsell and cross-sell opportunities. You can also create campaigns to capture a sales conversion from leads close to purchasing decisions.
These campaigns are best reserved for subscribers at the bottom of the conversion funnel. In other words, they have shown unquestionable purchase intent.
For example, even if I don’t follow through, abandoned cart emails make me ruminate on a purchase decision. These emails can help you recover lost sales conversions or promote a flash sale to get users to upgrade.
Effective email marketing campaigns
need to be cleverly written to attract attention in busy inboxes, but the options are endless.
While email has managed to stand the test of time, some marketers haven’t updated their strategies since its inception.
Outline your goals
As with all marketing efforts, the first step is to decide on your desired outcome. Is it to clean up your list? Promote a new product? Different campaigns require different tactics, so determining the purpose of your campaign helps you create the targets you want to hit.
Plan with your audience in mind
The key to a great email marketing campaign is understanding your audience and why they subscribe to your emails. When you know this, you can share content with them that directly aligns with their interests.
If you have a wide range of subscribers with varying interests, we’d recommend using email segmentation and personalization to make sure you deliver the right content to the right people at the right time.
Create a campaign timeline
Another crucial step is creating a timeline. If you’re running a seasonal campaign, you may only send 1-2 emails. But, a long-term top-of-mind nurturing campaign, like building hype for the launch of a new product, will be much more than 2 emails.
Tailor the length of your email sequences (including follow-ups) to the length of the buying cycle and stage the persona is at in the buyer's journey.
Write high-quality email copy
More often than not, an engaging subject line is what entices people to click on an email, even if it’s from a brand or sender I don’t usually pay attention to.
This is why creating good subject lines, and email copy in general (including multimedia elements) is a pivotal part of the email marketing process as it can mean the difference between excellent open rates or your emails sitting unopened in an inbox.
Use email builder tools
Once we’ve completed the above steps, the easiest way to execute your campaign is to use email builder software that lets us create, optimize, and personalize your email campaigns.
Keep an eye on your metrics
As your campaign runs, we take notes. Are your open rates and click rates what you expected? Are you on track to hitting your goals with the campaign?
Your data will tell us exactly what is and isn’t working, leading to more effective campaigns in the future.
Are you ready to dive deeper and actually get started with your email marketing campaign? Join us at RISE, we're ready to take you there!
Your Turn to Create Effective Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing is a fantastic way to nurture leads, engage subscribers, and retain customers. We will help you brainstorm winning campaigns that drive sales and offer a high ROI.