5 Tips For Launching A Successful Email Marketing Campaign

Email marketing is a powerful tool that is an essential element of any marketing strategy and can extend your reach beyond your website, which will create new sales opportunities. Email marketing campaigns make it possible to communicate and build relationships with prospects, gather important data, and helps boost marketing ROI.

Here are 5 tips for launching a successful email marketing campaign.

Build Your Email Marketing Subscriber List

The easiest and most common way to build your subscriber list is to integrate an email opt-in form on your website. This would include your homepage, About page, contact us page, and another option to consider is having a pop-up form.

Be sure to not require too much information to opt-in for the newsletter, as the less information required for someone to sign up the more likely they are to do so. Typically, only requiring an email address and first name results in the highest opt-in rates.

Make the Links and Calls to Action Obvious

In our previous blog, we delved into three tips for creating effective calls to action, which you can read here.

While a call to action is used to drive the reader to click-through to whatever it is you’re trying to promote, calls to action are useless if they are buried in your content or don’t make sense.

Not only will you want to place your links and calls to action in the natural line of sight of the reader, you will also want to use images or buttons that make it obvious to click on them for additional information. Placing links and calls to action above the fold will help mitigate any concerns of readers missing them.

Make it Mobile-Friendly

Smartphone usage has skyrocketed over the last decade and according to Litmus, 43 percent of email is now opened on a mobile device. That number is up 138 percent from 2010 and will likely continue to grow.

Ensuring your email marketing campaign is mobile friendly is key to ensuring it doesn’t get sent to the trash nearly immediately.

Because of the limited real estate you get with mobile devices you’ll want to stick to simple layouts that make the most of the real estate you do have. What that means is not overloading your email with images because different smartphones handle loading images differently when an email is opened.

For example, Apple’s iOS enables images automatically but Android-based devices do not, so readers won’t see them unless they manually enable them.

You’ll also want to avoid using tiny fonts, so stick to a minimum font size of 12pt for body text and ramp it up to around 22pt for headlines.

Additionally, don’t stack links on top of each other because it makes it too difficult to click the link you want on a smartphone screen and limit your subject lines to around 50 characters.

Write Compelling Subject Lines

Since we’re on the topic of subject lines, there are key strategies to maximizing your click-through rate by creating compelling subject lines for your email marketing campaign. This also happens to be one of the most important elements to a successful email campaign.

First and foremost, you’ll want to avoid words that light up the “spam” alarm in our brains such as “guarantee”, “free”, “call now”, “urgent” and “order now”. You’ll want to keep your subject line to 50 characters or less and include your company or brand name while also personalizing the subject line.

For example;

“Lance, Here’s Your TRIdigital’s April Newsletter!”

The example subject line above is 49 characters long, including spaces, and quickly gets to the point and lets the recipient know exactly what they’re getting without setting off their spam detectors.

Test Your Email Marketing Campaign Before Sending

All of the advice in the world will not alleviate the need to test your email marketing campaign before sending it out to the bulk of your distribution lists. There are multiple ways to test out your campaign, which range from testing out the design, copy, and subject lines as well as multiple combinations of each one.

One of the most effective ways to test your campaign before officially sending it out is to perform A/B testing.

A/B testing is also called split testing, is a testing method that allows you to test a hypothesis about human behavior – which for this purpose is which subject lines or email design gets the highest click-through and open rates.

People from your distribution list will be provided two different versions of your email campaign, based on the rules you set in place, and the version with the higher conversion rate is the one that you would want to move forward with.