How to Build an Email Marketing Campaign

Email is the most generic form of communication in the world. It outpaces text messages, phone calls, physical mail, and surprisingly telegrams. That was a joke, we are having fun. Email is surprisingly engaging, and it is almost impossible for a working individual to NOT have an email in today’s world. One often forgotten benefit of email is that it is free. We only spend the money on the electricity our device uses to send an email, regardless of if that email is to four million people all at once from one single email marketing campaign.

Having a direct line of communication with prospective clients or customers was a pipe dream even thirty years ago, and now it is the only feasible way to reach out to people. The return on investment is also gigantic, like we said, sending an email is free. Using modern technology, we can also alter emails to be composed differently depending on who the recipient is using a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

In this insight, we are going to show you effective strategies, cost-effective services, and ingenious ways to build an email list and begin an email marketing campaign. Grab a pencil and paper, there will be a bunch of notes to take on specific trajectories, and it depends on your business, brand, or goal. This is how to Build an Email Marketing Campaign in 2024.

First, we need to define the purpose of this email marketing campaign. Analyze your situation, are you a small one-person business, a successful medium-sized business, a lone content creator, or an agent working on behalf of a company through a third party? Scope yourself out and write a description of your own situation. You will keep this in mind as you jot down more ideas.

Here are some examples as to why a person or group wants to start an email marketing campaign:

Brand Awareness – Keeping your business in the public eye. Sending a “Happy Valentine’s Day offer through an email is not earth shattering, but it will remind your customers of your existence. Getting in front of your potential customers or clients is important and incredibly easy to do.

Lead Generation – Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems usually have a scoring system for your email contacts. (These are services like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Constant Contact) If they engage with an email, they get a point. The higher the points they have, the more likely they are click on links or buy from you. Lead Generation can play an exceedingly significant role in email marketing campaigns, especially when you are emailing thousands of people regularly.

Sales – Simple, you want to encourage sales. You might send a coupon, an event invite, whatever. Enticing prospective customers with exceptional deals is a great reason to send out some mass emails.

We need to set measurable goals for your business. You might have read one of those reasons and related to it, so now we need to gauge exactly where you stand. How much traffic could you handle? What demographics are you hoping to reach now and in the future? Think about those things for your email campaign.

Tracking email interactions has never been easier or more accurate, and when used in a CRM you can see every email that was opened and every user who clicked a link out of that email, and it can be printed off in an organized chart. For you or someone you might be working for. These clicks and opens and conversion rates also register in the lead-scoring system we just mentioned, it all works together to display which customers are most likely to buy.

In most CRM systems you can define customers with data points labeling them as specific “personas”. You may want to tweak an email by income bracket, by state, or by relationship to the company. This dynamic data set can alter the same email on fundamental levels in the CRM before sending it. The same email will populate information based on the defining traits of a person, like their state, pronouns, or business name. This segments your email lists a little bit, but you can manually separate your contact lists into columns of descriptors, and email more succinctly to different demographics.

This establishes the foundation for an email campaign that also doubles as a lead-scoring system.

We need to create a reason for people to willingly give you their email addresses for this email marketing campaign. Let us imagine we are fishing for a second, what kind of bait can we use to get a nibble from those prospective customers? Here are a few ideas to get people to trade their information for something of value:

eBooks – If your company has information that might be hard to find or decipher, consider creating a PDF of concrete knowledge that can help someone who might buy from you. Simply put that behind an email sign-up and you have a perpetual docket available for download at the low price of one email address. The upkeep of a digital project is non-existent and can be a real draw to potential clients.

Checklists or Calendars – You may not have the design chops to build something from the ground up, but there are plenty of starting points for digital creation in programs like Adobe Express or Canva. We often build content calendars for brands, here at Acclaim, and something as simple as a printable product will be much more alluring to people if all they need is an email address. Again, upkeep of a digital product is free.

Discounts – Offering a discount code on a product at checkout is another terrific way to convince a potential customer to not only buy from you, but to give you their email address. This possibility may cost you something, but it can be as little as 5% off and in return you can email sales and information to them later, further nurturing that business-client relationship through your email marketing campaign.

Installing email sign-ups and contact forms on your website can help build your email list as well. Make sure to place them strategically so customers do not feel bothered by it, more so that it feels like part of the process. You can also trigger pop-ups to ask people visiting your website to sign up, but be careful as these can be extremely annoying, especially if it happens multiple times while visiting the same website.

Social media is another wonderful way to get email addresses. Having competitions for a discount code or giveaway is an extremely trendy way to get email addresses. This may cost you something, but if you were to give away a bike and all people had to do was message you their email to win that bike, well they are going to try and win that bike. Once you complete the giveaway you will have a decent number of emails, just make sure to boost the posts and try to reach a larger audience than just your current followers. This builds up a roster for your future email marketing campaigns as well.

Much like a thumbnail on a YouTube video, you want to have an attention-grabbing subject line. It needs to be brief with either some importance in the subject or an eyebrow-raising catch. Typing “Sale” is much less attention grabbing than “50% off this weekend only”

Make sure to set your CRM to A/B test email subject lines. In programs like HubSpot and Constant Contact you can have an email drip campaign set to use multiple subject lines and as the email is sent out over periods of time the CRM will gather data and use the better performing subject line naturally.

Having an aesthetically pleasing email is also especially important. A plain text block is uninteresting and bland. It was cool in 1998 when email first started becoming widespread, but in 2024 you need images, backgrounds, links, and much more. It also needs to be responsive to mobile devices and tablets. Every CRM or email marketing tool should be able to add these facets easily.

Inside these email creation tools you will need to familiarize yourself with the term “merge variable.” This means entering a code in the email to pull information from the contact in your email marketing program and populate it. It will look something like this:

The code entered assigns that specific data point from an individual’s contact. The “Valued Customer” is displayed if there is no information on the customer’s name. Every platform has their own merged variables that all use different code in their email marketing services.

Using these merged variables, you can customize and personalize every aspect of an email. You can pull data from their business, address, industry, and so much more. This can tailor your email to a huge audience without having to recreate it repeatedly. It is a neat technological future, and more miracles are sure to emerge in the realm of email marketing.

As much as we would like to explain the ins and outs of the entire automation of an email campaign, there are entire business structures dedicated to figuring out the best times and days to send what kinds of emails all over the world. We will give just a brief idea of what a “trigger” is, and how they can be used to automatically send an email.

A “trigger” is an action a customer or business can take to fulfill a specific requirement, which sends an email automatically. When you buy an item from Amazon you automatically receive a confirmation email, and the trigger was the successful purchase on their website.

These triggers can be added to a sales funnel inside a CRM, and the specifics can get overwhelming. Setting up triggers based on what income bracket they fall into, what information they ask, what action they have taken on your website, or even what city they live in can all be used as triggers for an automatic email in your marketing campaign.

We will go further into this in another insight, hopefully you see that the more triggers there are the more emails go out. This leads us to our next point about Automation: avoiding spam complaints. Always make sure you clean your email lists using a service like Kickbox, which scans through your entire email list and will give you the emails that either do not exist or will bounce. A bounce is an undelivered email, a hard bounce means the email is invalid and a soft bounce means the email could not receive anything due to some other complication. Also, make sure to have an unsubscribe button on every email, as an annoyed customer might want to report you out of spite.

Remember how we mentioned a CRM or email marketing platform can give you a digestible data report? Here we are going to discuss the different metrics most companies will track:

Open Rate – This is the percentage of emails opened versus how many are sent. It is straightforward.

Click-Through Rate – After a recipient has opened an email they may click on a link to a webpage. This is usually to your own website, or a social media site where your profiles exist. Tracking who is clicking on what is an important metric, as it will show what people are most interested in, or at least what seems the most important to them.

Conversion Rate – This is the potential customer who not only opened the email, who not only clicked a link, but then also signed up for a service or bought a product. This will give you the best data on your target audience. Tracking who bought your product is definitively your demographic.

Some CRM systems can place code in place of a URL on your website or social media page. This is not part of the email marketing campaign per se, but it is another avenue to develop your information database.

These are often compiled into one report about an email campaign. Looking at the metrics will help you adjust course with who you are sending emails, and the content of your emails. If no one opens an email, change the subject line. If no one clicks a link after opening the email, change where the links are presented or where they go. Through multiple chains of A/B testing you should be able to adjust your strategy and improve those numbers as the email marketing campaign continues.

If you made it this far you have learned the basics of the entire process. Every email marketing campaign is different, but you now have a general knowledge of the process.

Remember:

• Use catchy subject lines
• Make sure your emails are designed for mobile and desktop
• Avoid spam traps, clean your email lists
• Learn tools like merging variables
• Practice A/B testing your campaigns
• Be comfortable adjusting strategy after collecting data

Consider the effectiveness of email marketing, as it is the best return on investment in most marketing strategies. Hopefully, this has given you some insight into the marketing world, and if you do not have the time to work and monitor an email marketing campaign yourself, a marketing agency will be able to aid you in the operation.

Acclaim is a certified SharpSpring and Constant Contact partner and can gladly answer any questions you have about starting your own personal email campaign. Call us anytime.