Email Marketing Campaigns done the right way.

Email marketing remains one of the elite channels for businesses to stay in touch with new and existing customers. I say elite because it is a direct communication line to your customers and prospects and it allows you to keep them informed of the new products and services that you release. Setting up email marketing is an efficient way to reach your current customers as well as reach new leads and turn those leads into customers.

Customers who have previously purchased on your site are more than likely to return to your site and complete another purchase when they receive remarketing emails. And what are remarketing emails? Remarketing emails are emails that follow up with customers or prospects after they have visited your website or performed an action on your website such as buying a product, downloading a form, etc. Remarketing emails are not the same as autoresponders. If you're trying to learn how to set up an email marketing campaign, then the steps below will get you started in the right direction.

Determine goals for your email marketing campaigns

If you want your campaign to be successful, you need to think about what you're trying to accomplish. This is important or else you'll be wasting time and money. For instance, if you sell products in an eCommerce store, you might be trying to drive sales. So, your emails might link to best sellers, welcome new members, promote new merchandise or reward loyal customers. Understand your email marketing goals before you send your first e-mail, and build your messages and campaign around those goals.

Choose an email marketing service

If you're looking to build good email marketing campaigns, you can go about doing this in a few ways, but first, you need the right email marketing service provider like GetResponse, MailChimp, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor and much more. I personally use MailChimp because of what they offer to small business. Compare them and see which one fits your objectives or you can just use the one I use which is MailChimp. Additionally, it's worth comparing email marketing service providers to determine which one best fits your budget and can scale to support your growth when the time comes.

Build and segment your email lists

Segmentation Is about dividing your email list based on different criteria pertinent to your business. For instance, if you have an e-commerce website you can divide your email list into people who make a purchase and people who put something in the cart but did not make a purchase. Because you segmented your list in these two ways, now you can send out marketing campaigns targeted uniquely to those 2 lists. Don't forward the same email to everyone! It's evident that very few companies take the time to do segmentation. While it takes time and strategy to manage and segment a targeted email-marketing list, it's worth the investment, because it ensures that the message that you send out will be relevant to recipients.

Segmenting your list allows you send out highly targeted emails to people based on their demographic criteria or interests. If the email is relevant to them, they're more likely to open the email; if they open the email, there's a chance that they could convert. Depending on the service you offer, you could segment your email according to location, demographics, firmographics, the amount spent, past purchases, time since last purchase, expressed interests and email engagement. In short, there are many ways to segment your email list.

Create and name your campaign

Creating and naming your campaign is not straightforward in an email-marketing platform. Depending on the provider, you'll have a series of steps between this point and before sending the email. In this stage, you'll need to choose your template, which is where your creative juices can start flowing.

At some point, you'll create your email template where you put the information people see when they receive the email in their inbox. The next step is to get your email recipients to open the email and click on one of the links in your mail. You're going to need a combination of effective visual and textual presentation. This is where it pays to understand what your customers value.

Enable autoresponders

Autoresponders are utilized in email marketing to build trust, nurture leads, convey useful information about services, products, or promotions and provide confirmation that data was received. Autoresponders can be set to send out emails at regular intervals like daily, weekly or triggered by specific actions.

Make sure that each autoresponders email has several links for more information; this is how you will determine how to keep marketing to them and gauge their interest.

Set up tracking

If you want to improve engagement and increase email conversions, then make sure to utilize tracking and analytics. Tracking and getting performance analytics is how you optimize your marketing assets and email campaigns based on what works for each segment. Tracking and analyzing your marketing helps you to understand what is happening and without it you are blind. It's almost the same as driving a car with a blindfold.

You should be able to track metrics like Spam Complaint Rate, Bounce Rate, Unsubscribe Rate, Click-to-Open Rate, Click-through Rate and more, using Google Analytics and the email marketing service provider-tracker to understand what is happening with your campaigns.

Send your email

Now it's time to send the email after you've created it. Before you blast an email with a grammatical error to your subscribers, send it to yourself and read through it several times or send it to a friend for review to ensure it's perfect. Now you're set to go.