Being able to engage all of your prospects with an effective email campaign is a great marketing vehicle for your business. The best part, there is no limit to its potential and reward.
Email marketing can be a streamlined process to add to your marketing wheelhouse if you know how to do it right. This creates another touchpoint that can educate, promote or celebrate your latest successes as a business.
Additionally, monitoring metrics such as opens and clicks allows you to evaluate overall engagement and prove the ROI of your email campaign.
To get the most out of your efforts, you need to have these four foundational elements in place in order to build a productive email program:
Set goals that are right for your business
At the outset, it’s important to set an end goal that aligns with your overall strategy, otherwise your email marketing efforts can quickly go awry. For long-term success, it’s not just about blasting out content periodically, it’s about selecting the ideal end result for your business.
Establishing the right goal upfront will determine the overall success of your campaign. It will also impact other components of your emails, as email performance can help you gauge what content and messages connect with your audience.
Curate a verified list of contacts
Having the right list of email addresses – whether they are current customers or hot prospects – is a key ingredient of how successful your email campaigns will be. Ideally, the list of email addresses will be individuals who already opted for email content from your company. Additionally, you’ll want to make sure your list is full of valid email addresses, so when your first email goes out you’ll have a decent delivery rate.
Pro Tip: An easy way to check for valid email addresses is to utilize a service like BriteVerify. You simply upload a .csv file of your email list and it tells you which email addresses are valid or invalid.
Build strong content pillars
Every good email campaign has a funnel of new content being pushed through as often as you would like to send out emails. For instance, if there is a quarterly newsletter, there should be fresh content to publish and share for each newsletter.
Ultimately, the content should be geared toward building trust and growing relationships with your audience. Building “content pillars” for your email campaign is a good place to start. For example, if your audience is new prospects, a potential content pillar topic could be to feature a case study. This will get your prospects excited to click and open your email, and the case study will build trust that you know how to do the job.
Pro Tip: It’s good to have several content pillars or categories from which your business can regularly generate similar new content. These content pillars can be created over time based on which content your audience engages in most. It’s also critical to always have a strong CTA on all emails.
Choose the right email platform
Now that you have all the assets in place to send out your email, you need an email marketing platform to actually send out the emails. There are some pros and cons to every platform, but some of SWBR’s favorites are MailChimp and HubSpot.
Some are more robust than others with add-ons and features such as automation, but it’s important to pick a platform that can deliver against your stated goals.
Whether you’re a veteran at email automation or a beginner with marketing platforms, SWBR is here to help. Contact us and let’s build you an email campaign that truly connects with your customers.
