Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective and conversion-rich forms of digital marketing today. It’s powerful, compelling, and gets your eCommerce store excellent results. In 2020, the number of email users worldwide was 4 billion, which is estimated to grow to 4.6 billion in 2025. This means you could miss out on a lot if you are not making the most of email marketing.

An email marketing campaign is a set of organized emails that helps you connect with your audience to promote your brand, sell products, share important information, improve your cart abandonment rate, or share a story. Numerous companies deploy email marketing campaigns for specific periods and purposes, such as product sales or increased conversion rates.

To create an email marketing campaign, you need to know what the marketing strategy is all about. This article explains the importance of email marketing campaigns and offers practical steps to creating an engaging email marketing campaign for your audience.

Why Do You Need an Email Marketing Campaign?

Currently, over 333 billion people send and receive emails daily, and the figure is projected to increase to 376.4 billion by 2025. With this massive number of people accessing emails daily, running email marketing campaigns for your brand can be an easy way to generate leads, build profitable relationships with customers, deliver value, and drive real business results.

Here are more reasons why you need an email marketing campaign.

• To increase your ROI: email marketing campaigns are low cost, easy and affordable to scale, and very rewarding. Studies show that email marketing has a return on investment (ROI) of $36 for every $1 spent.
• To communicate seamlessly with your subscribers: whether you’re just starting an eCommerce business or any other business, a good email marketing campaign can help you communicate smoothly with your subscribers. Email marketing campaigns offer you easy access to share your B2B marketing services with your subscribers, and since email communication is permission-based, you will most likely get a lot of responses.
• To boost web traffic to relevant pages and sites: an engaging email marketing campaign drives traffic to your website and increases sales of essential products.

6 Steps to Creating an Engaging Email Marketing Campaign

The following steps will help you create an engaging email marketing campaign.

Step 1: Leverage cheap Constant Contact alternatives

Constant Contact is a great option to consider when launching an email marketing campaign. Constant Contact is a well-organized email marketing platform. It provides email marketing tools that are easy to use for beginners and can skyrocket your email market campaign. There are cheap Constant Contact alternatives for beginners that you can leverage. 

With Constant Contact, you have access to marketing tools that have built-in templates and customization options that help you create email copies that reflect your brand’s identity. They can also facilitate the scheduling and automation of your email distribution so that you can focus on other aspects of your business. 

In addition, these tools allow seamless integration with other third-party software, e.g., payment software. This integration helps you achieve your goals without any hassle and provide a great customer experience for your audience.

Step 2: Define the goal of your email campaign

To create an engaging email marketing campaign for your brand, you need to define the goal of the campaign. Ask yourself, at the end of the email marketing campaign, what do I aim to achieve? Build customer relationships? Increase website traffic? Receive new subscribers? Boost sales? Promote a product or service? Whatever your overall goal for the email marketing campaign is, will guide you in tailoring the campaign to yield positive results.

Step 3: Determine your target audience

Irrespective of your industry, your business likely has several different customers with unique needs and attributes. So, you need a clear idea of who your audience is to effectively communicate with them and run a successful email marketing campaign.

Different tactics work for different audiences. To understand your audience better, you can build a profile for each of your ideal customers interested in your offerings and target them to join your email list. For example, if you have a website, you can target visitors by including opt-ins or a pop-up on your homepage to make them subscribe.

You can further target a smaller collection of people within your subscribers based on factors such as age, gender, location, preferences, interest, and online activity. 

Step 4: Select your preferred email campaign type

There are several types of emails that you can send out to accomplish specific goals. However, your email type largely depends on your goal and target audience.

Here are some email campaign types you should know.

• Newsletters: this is a popular type of email campaign. They are usually non-promotional, and brands can use them to share industry news and updates, features, tips, tricks, blog roundups, and lots more with their subscribers.
• Marketing offers: marketing offers are a more general email campaign type; basically promotions and discounts, aimed at a particular response — to generate sales. This campaign usually focuses on one product that the customers can buy at a special price, and it has a direct call to make a purchase. An example is Black Friday Marketing.
• Abandoned cart emails: this email campaign is a valuable tool for customers who visit your site and add something to their cart but leave without completing the purchase.
• Seasonal campaigns: these emails are sent around specific times and seasons. For example, campaigns for couples around Valentine’s day. 

Step 5: Create engaging email content

Once you have figured out your email marketing platform, goal, target audience, and email type, creating your email content becomes much more straightforward. The email content comprises three main parts.

The Header

The header consists of everything your audience sees before they open your emails, including the name and subject line. The goal is to entice your recipients to open the email and read your message. A helpful tip here is to use real names instead of anonymous names. Furthermore, the subject line should be short (around 40 – 50 characters), action-oriented, personal, and honest

The Body

The body of your email content should connect you with your subscribers, create a long-term bond, and, most importantly, achieve your campaign goals. It should be interesting and valuable enough to make your audience take action. When writing the email, ensure that you maintain a friendly tone and include personal details like names or purchase history. You also should avoid being overly sales and pitchy too early on. 

In addition, avoid overloading your email with so much information. If you have so much to say, you can simply create a landing page with all the information and include a link in the email that will direct them to the landing page.

The Footer

At the end of your email, there should be a clear call-to-action (CTA) that’s developed in a way that makes it stand out from the rest of the email and align with your campaign goals.

Step 6: Measure the success of your email marketing campaign

Email marketing campaigns don’t end the moment you press send. It’s crucial that you measure the results of your campaign. Analyze your campaign metrics to get a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not and make changes as required.

Below are the key metrics to monitor.

• Open rate: Open rate gauges the number of people who opened your emails. It also determines how successful your subject lines are and the best time to send emails.
• Click-through rate (CTR): CTR tracks the number of people that clicked on a link in your email. It’s a great way to discover how valuable your audience finds your content.
• Bounce rate: The bounce rate shows you the percentage of people who didn’t receive your email. When your bounce rate is high, it could suggest that your email contact list is full of fake, inactive, or outdated contacts or that you may need to change your email marketing tool.
• Unsubscribe rate: This helps you know how many people clicked the unsubscribe button in your emails. If the number is high, you should consider upgrading your content to become more relevant to each person on your email list.

Get ready to create an engaging email marketing campaign

Whatever business you’re running, creating engaging email marketing campaigns can significantly benefit you if you conduct them correctly. Advantages of a successful email campaign include increased ROI, traffic to the website and improved sales.

To create an engaging email marketing campaign, you should consider taking advantage of cheap Constant Contact alternatives, have a clearly defined goal for your campaign, determine your target audience, choose an email campaign type, create engaging content, and measure the success of your email marketing campaign.

Moyofade Ipadeola is a Content Strategist, UX Writer and Editor. Witty, she loves personal development and helping people grow. Mo, as she’s fondly called, is fascinated by all things tech.

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