Engaging Effectively With Email Marketing

With 3.7 billion email users in the world and the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, businesses need to use strategies such as email marketing to engage with their audience directly. Email marketing is completely controlled by you and is directly sent straight to your target market to communicate key messages. Email marketing can be campaigns such as e-newsletters, e-bulletins, e-catalogues and much more! 

By utilising email campaigns, you are able to cost effectively communicate to hundreds or thousands of your stakeholders with important information, updates, news, or promotions in one place and at any time you desire! Effective email campaigns have the ability to convert prospects into customers, boost your brand’s reputation and visibility, and influence one-off buyers to become loyal clients. You have the power to inspire, inform and influence your audience and grow your business.

Did we mention that creating email campaigns are virtually free too? That’s right! You can design a beautiful e-newsletter or e-catalogue with professional branding, content and messages with no advertising costs! You may also choose to opt to pay for specific software if you want to take your email marketing further!

Examples of email marketing tools with free versions include:

• MailChimp
• Campaign Monitor
• HubSpot
• MailerLite

These programs are great for small to medium sized businesses, and have easy to use tools for campaign development, client relationship management and resources for KPI tracking.

Acquiring An Audience

If you are creating your e-newsletter subscriber list, you can grow your audience by: 

• Promoting your new e-newsletter on social media;
• Asking for an email address during the checkout phase;
• Implementing a subscribe button in your email signature;
• Implementing calls to action on landing pages and across your website; and
• Creating targeted ads to direct your target audience to landing pages with your call to action.

Getting Your Email Campaign Started

When creating your email campaign, you should know what kind of campaign type it will be, the message you want to communicate, the frequency of the email campaign and what your SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-bound) campaign goals are. 

Examples of email campaign types can be:

• Triggered email campaigns from calls to action messaging
• Normal organisational internal or external e-newsletters
• Promotional campaigns
• Seasonal campaigns

An example of an email campaign goal may be:

To boost e-commerce sales by 20%.

• 1. Campaign idea: Sending an email campaign to promote specific sales.
     • Campaign idea 1 goal: Increase website traffic for your online store and promote the customer purchasing journey with an increase of x number of sales by the end of the month/quarter.
  2. Campaign idea: Creating an automated email for cart abandonment.
     • Campaign idea 2 goal: Retarget prospective customers who have already visited your online store and increase the amount of returning customers to finish their purchase by x amount by the end of the period.

Examples of content to include in your email campaigns are:

• Blogs from your website
• Industry or organisation news
• Customer testimonials/success stories
• Promotions/Competitions
• Events/Webinars

It is great to have an insightful email campaign but keep in mind that not everyone will want to read a lengthy email. Do not over-explain the information and ensure it is mobile friendly! Get straight to the point with precise headers, be consistent with your tone and branding, keep to similar image styles, and ensure that the layout of your email campaign is easy to follow. Take your time with designing your campaign layout as this can set the tone for the rest of your campaigns! This maximises engagement, readability and deliverability. Some tips to grab relevant content for your email campaigns is by asking internal staff about updates or achievements, and external stakeholders of any good news stories. 

Effective Email Titles and Subject Lines

With the number of emails people receive each day, it is important that your email campaign stands out and pulls the reader in to take the first step of opening your email. Some headline and subject line tips you can use to draw attention to your email are:

• Including an interesting fact, an awesome benefit of opening the email, or a ‘fear of missing out’ (FOMO!) message to influence your visitor’s curiosity. Who wants to miss out on great deals or free promotions?
• Speaking in the tone of your brand which may involve humour or be straight to the point. This is why they found you in the first place, you piqued their interest!
• Adding an emoji to the subject line. According to Campaign Monitor, using Emoji’s in subject lines can increase open rates by 56%! You can read more about using emojis in your email campaigns in our Marketing Tip “Using Emoji’s in Your Marketing”.

Measuring Success In Your Email Campaign

After sending out your email campaign, you’ll be able to start tracking the results of your campaign! You will be able to look at the demographics of your audience and learn their behaviour surrounding your campaign. You can track:

• Click through rates/open rate
• Link clicks
• Bounce rates
• Delivery rates
• Subscribers or unsubscribers

With this information, you can create Marketing Reports to show which strategies were successful, which goals were achievable and how you can grow your brand with email campaigns. Work out what works best for your brand and engages your audience. 

Need some extra help creating your email campaign content? Read our Canva Marketing Tips to help create awesome graphics for your campaign!

• A Marketers Guide To Canva
• Marketers Guide To Canva Part Two 
• Marketers Guide To Canva Part Three

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