Every small business should know how to design a proper email marketing campaign– whether it’s for the purpose of brand-building, capitalizing on a niche market, or nurturing relationships with a base of subscribers.
Email marketing remains one of the most powerful growth tools for any business.
Imagine the potential when you have an active subscriber base, right at your fingertips. You can email them any time you like, with all sorts of offers, high-quality content, and valuable resources that work towards helping you establish yourself within these niche markets. At the same time, you’re also building a solid relationship with your subscriber base.
Whether you’re building a brand, encouraging customer interaction, or otherwise tapping into some of the most profitable niche markets, email marketing campaigns help you develop a targeted subscriber base of responsive subscribers and customers.
In this manner, email marketing continues to be an important component of your marketing arsenal.
To put a successful email marketing campaign into action, you’ll be needing:
- A professional autoresponder account (such as GetResponse, Aweber, and other similar services).
- A landing page and lead magnet.
- A series of follow-up emails.
- A/B testing.
- An online presence (by way of your website and social media accounts).
- And a relationship with your audience.
Table of Contents
How is List Building an Important Part of My Email Marketing Strategy?
List building is all about connecting with your target audience by offering them high-quality information and consistently working towards building a strong relationship with each and every subscriber.
Through list building, you add prospects to your business’s mailing list. In so doing, you help facilitate the process of converting subscribers into active customers.
You will then be able to develop a relationship with them by communicating directly through your follow-up email broadcasts.
In truth, there is no faster or easier way to bring in steady business than with a relevant, targeted, and responsive mailing list.
You can get ten times the work done in half the time when you are able to instantly touch base with a built-in customer base, who are interested in specific topics or niche markets.
Through your own mailing list, you can simply create broadcasts that go out to your entire subscriber base that feature a blend of high-quality information and content with promotional based offers and promotions.
You can then include affiliate promotions for products and services that are relevant to your list. However, more importantly, you are able to generate feedback, tap into your market in such a way that you know exactly what they are interested in receiving and what they are most likely to respond to.
Kath Pay, CEO and Founder of Holistic Email Marketing, on the importance of list building on your email marketing campaign.
The Components of a Successful Email Marketing Campaign
What are the components of a successful email marketing campaign? Let’s dive right into each one.
1. Your professional autoresponder account
“Now more than ever, we need a tool like email to build connection and intimacy with our audience. They want to be seen above anything else, and emailing is one of many ways you can do that for them. The advantage of email over social media is that it’s not a fleeting post. You don’t have to “figure out the algorithm”. Your subscribers proactively chose to build this relationship with you and they want to know what’s going on in your life and your business. Let them in.”
— Cathy Heller, Host of Don’t Keep Your Day Job Podcast
One of the most important steps you’ll ever take as an email marketer is in choosing to power your mailing lists by establishing an account with a professional autoresponder provider.
With autoresponder services like AWeber, Constant Contact, or Mailchimp, you are able to set up an unlimited number of mailing lists. Each one featuring customized code that serves as your opt-in box.
You then segment your lists, so you will be able to tailor your emails so that they directly communicate with targeted groups of subscribers who are interested in specific information or topics.
There are many different reasons why setting up a professional autoresponder account is important, including:
Autoresponders provide data & statistics.
If you are interested in maximizing your open rate and overall response rates, you need to utilize the different features available within your autoresponder account including your average open rate, opt-out rate, response rate, and whether any complaints have been sent in regarding your recent mailing.
Keeping a pulse on your subscriber base and how well they respond to your broadcasts will help you improve your mailings and tailor your campaigns so that they directly communicate with those who have subscribed to your lists.
Autoresponders guarantee high deliverability & performance.
By setting up your mailing list with an experienced autoresponder service team, you can rest assured that your emails will make it to their destination. It’s their job to maximize deliverability rates and help you connect to your subscriber base quickly and easily.
Autoresponders helps protect your mailing lists.
Professional autoresponder providers offer frequent back-ups of your database in the event it becomes corrupted or inaccessible. This is extremely important because the last thing you would want to do is spend the time and energy developing a massive list of subscribers, only to lose it all.
Also, your autoresponder service provider will also handle all requests to unsubscribe. It helps you comply with CanSpam regulations and provides you with the ability to write as many newsletter messages as you wish and set up the dates and times you want them to be published.
2. Landing pages and lead magnets
One of the most important elements of a successful email marketing campaign begins with a well-constructed, highly targeted landing page.
Email marketers collect leads using landing pages that are focused on specific topics, and include an opt-in form that includes text fields such as a visitor’s full name and email address, and acts as the doorway into your autoresponder system.
- These opt-in boxes are generated by your autoresponder provider and are embedded into the HTML code of your landing page template with just a few clicks of your mouse.
- Each time a visitor to your landing page enters in their name and email address, they are added to your mailing list database and become an active subscriber of your newsletter.
- Once a subscriber is a confirmed member of your list, you can begin sending follow-up emails that offer high-quality information, such as articles, reports, links to blog posts, video guides, and other information and resources that your subscribers would find useful.
In order to create an effective landing page that encourages visitors into subscribing to your list, consider the different types of incentives– or lead magnets— that you can offer. When it comes to listing the benefits you need to be clear and concise.
You could offer:
- a report, presentation, case study, or white paper.
- ebooks or guides.
- designs or templates.
- graphic packages.
- video guides.
- tutorials.
- or a free sample chapter (from a paid product).
Make sure they understand ‘what is in it for them’, and demonstrate the benefits of becoming a subscriber of your newsletter.
Through your lead magnet, set out to solve a problem, address an issue, offer guidance, advice, and somehow address their most pressing pain points and concerns directly.
3. A series of follow-up emails
Liz Willits, Senior Content Marketing Specialist at AWeber, on the importance of writing awesome copy on your email marketing campaign.
To better organize and manage your email marketing, you should consider creating a delivery schedule that will provide your subscribers with a clear idea as to when they should expect your emails and broadcasts.
Being consistent will help you develop a relationship with your list while conditioning them to pay attention to your broadcasts, and ultimately, look out for these on a regular basis.
Doing this will increase your open-rates significantly!
When creating your first email campaign, you may want to create 5-10 emails to start, adding additional emails into your sequence as you begin to tap into your target audience, and create additional offers around an existing demand.
Remember though that subscribers who are already a part of your email cycle will not receive new emails that you add to the sequence unless you send out an actual broadcast.
You want your first email to send out automatically, after a new subscriber confirms their request to join your list, with additional follow-up emails being sent out every few (about two to three) days.
Remember: never let your list run cold!
Always keep notes of any ideas you have for future broadcasts and content, and if you are outsourcing content creation to freelancers, make sure that you always proof the material and add in your own style.
You want your subscribers to become familiar with your brand, and so even if you outsource the majority of the work you need to apply your own personal style to every email you send out.
4. A/B testing
Regardless of how well you design your site, or how thoroughly you analyze each section of your landing page, there is no way that you will be able to accurately predict how well your visitors will respond to your offer, without comparatively testing alternative layouts.
One easy method of testing your pages and evaluating conversion rates is by using Google’s Website Optimizer. It is a free tool that will help you run simple split tests of any websites you own.
(You can sign up for a free account on Google, here.)
You will need to add a snippet of code to your squeeze page after creating your Google Analytics account. This code is given to you by Google and is available within your account once you have added and verified your website’s location.
Once this code is placed on your website, Google Analytics will start tracking your visitors and traffic.
Remember: when doing your A/B testing, start with only one element at a time.
For example, if you change the headline on your squeeze page, leave everything else in its original state until you determine whether tweaking your headline helps with conversion rates.
Once you have determined what headline works best, change another element of your squeeze page, such as the color scheme, opt-in box frame, or summary of your offer.
Always test the original against the variation and give it enough time to accurately determine whether your changes have increased your subscription rate before making any permanent changes.
Mark Asquith, Co-Founder & CEO of Rebel Base Media, on the importance of A/B testing on your email marketing campaigns.
5. An online presence (by way of your website and social media accounts)
You should register your own domain names and set up professional hosting accounts that can house your landing pages and websites.
It’s important that you establish an online presence and give people clear direction as to how they can reach you or find out more about you.
There are many different providers available online that offer both domain names and hosting accounts. But you may want to consider LOJO’s own hosting services, including Managed WordPress hosting and others.
If you aren’t familiar with HTML and aren’t comfortable editing code or CSS, you could consider using WordPress to develop squeeze pages, quickly and easily.
With WordPress, you can set up a static website in just a few minutes, and by simply copy and pasting your autoresponder code into its main page, you can have a fully functional squeeze page set up within minutes.
“Frequency isn’t the primary issue. Writing amazing emails that provide value is. If your emails are incredibly entertaining, informative, and engaging, you can send as many emails as you want. Our best customers want us to send more emails – even twice a day. Yes, you should watch your open rates and unsubscribe rates closely, but some of this won’t show up in the metrics. You just know it when you see it.“
— Ramit Sethi, Author & Founder of I Will Teach You To Be Rich
6. A relationship with your audience
“Get to know your customers. Do interviews, learn more about them. What keeps them up at night? What matters most to them? Ask them questions with long-form answers and record those answers. Then use that voice-of-customer copy in your emails. Put it in subject lines and body copy and CTA buttons. Fill your emails with a blend of their voice and your brand voice and your customers will instantly feel connected to your brand.“
— Val Geisler, CEO of Fix My Churn
It’s important to build brand awareness and develop a relationship with your subscriber base. The more that your list members trust you and the product recommendations that you make, the easier it will be to convert those subscribers into repeat customers.
Every email you send to your list should directly work towards strengthening your brand’s recognition for value. This means that you must be extremely careful with the kinds of products you promote as well as the quality of the products you endorse.
Whether you are the developer or not, if you give it your stamp of approval, your subscriber base will hold you accountable should the product or service fail to deliver.
You should therefore always review each product or offer you are planning to promote so that you can not only stand behind it but also can directly answer any questions that your subscribers may have about the offer.
You also need to make sure that the products and services you are advertising are relevant to your newsletter’s overall theme or topic.
Some Fun Facts on Email Marketing
- 66% of small businesses said they use email marketing to promote their business or communicate with leads and/or customers.
- 79% of small businesses said email marketing is important or very important to their business strategy.
- 65% of businesses average open rates between 11% and 50%.
- 77% of businesses average email click-through rates between 0% and 10%.
- 54% of businesses send emails at least once per week. 86% send emails at least once per month.
A Final Word About Building a Successful Email Marketing Campaign
You can stand out from the majority of email marketers in your industry by over-delivering on fresh, quality content.
Remember that people sign up to receive your emails believing that they will benefit in some way. If you deliver quality, relevant, and useful information that truly helps them, you will be rewarded with an active and responsive subscriber base.
Focus on building a relationship with your subscribers through constant contact and updates.
Don’t let your list run cold by failing to communicate with your subscribers.
It’s relatively easy to design an email marketing campaign by using high-quality content of your own creation, and by hiring a digital marketing agency to help you develop your own high-performing lead nurturing initiatives.
