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Two Critical Email Campaigns You Should Start Sending Right Away
Not every business has a dedicated marketing team or an outsourced agency to handle their email marketing campaign. And thinking about all the possible email campaigns you could be sending is enough to set anyone’s head spinning.
But instead of trying to immediately incorporate every possible email campaign into your digital marketing strategy, focus on one or two campaigns to execute very well. By concentrating your efforts on a few email campaigns done well, you can maximize effort while not overtaxing your schedule or your staff.
The two types of email campaigns you should be sending for optimal results
There are many different kinds of email campaigns to consider when setting up a digital marketing strategy. But if you don’t want to spread your marketing staff—especially if that just means yourself—too thin, you’ll want to narrow your focus to only the most critical.
Let’s start at the beginning with one of the most critical campaigns for your business to run: the welcome campaign.
1. Starting off right with a welcome series email campaign
This is the most important email series to send because it represents your first contact with your customers when their excitement for your brand is at its most intense. Your welcome email should be warm, personal, and start off your relationship by emphasizing the value you bring to their lives.
A welcome email lets you be in charge of how your audience meets your brand for the first time. This offers a long-term benefit since welcome-email recipients are 39% more likely to stay engaged with you over time.
But the short-term benefits of sending welcome emails are real, too: welcome emails get four times greater open rates and five times greater click-through statistics than any other email campaign.
That’s proof positive that a welcome email is worth your time.
So, what’s the best way to craft a welcome series that puts you in the driver’s seat, makes a good impression, boosts engagement, and increases ROI?
To create a winning welcome email series, make sure you follow these tips:
Personalization
And the element of personalization is key to getting their attention and staying in the inbox. First, personalization increases open rates.
Automation
Automated email marketing allows you to send focused, personalized emails easily using a number of factors: name, age, geographic location (like this one from Lyft), and more.
Fine-tune the subject line
There is a lot of information out there on subject line best practices.
The important thing is to run A/B testing on a few of your faves to see what really resonates with your audience and gives you the best number of opens and click-throughs.
Give them value up front
People sign up for your emails because they believe you can deliver some type of value to them. That could be promotions or insider offers, or it could be curated content that enriches their lives or teaches them about one of their interests.
Either way, people will repeatedly read your emails day after day when they know that there’s something in it for them.
You don’t need to hard-sell your customers during your first impression, although you can offer them coupons, discounts, valuable tips and tricks, and other things they want in order to establish that it’s worth giving up space in their crowded inbox to hear from you.
Concentrate on your CTA
Your call-to-action (CTA) is the most critical part of your email. Don’t ignore it.
Make it easy for your subscribers to take the next step with you by having just one crystal-clear CTA.
It can be using a discount, signing up for a free trial, sharing on social media, or whatever you deem important for your company or products. But there should only be one.
Optimize for mobile
Everybody’s using mobile these days, so don’t lose someone with an email that doesn’t render well—or at all—on a mobile device.
Beautiful emails are great, but functional ones provide results. And non-functional ones? Well, statistics show more than 70% of people delete non-functional emails within three seconds.
Now that you’ve got welcome emails under control, let’s look at one of the other major types of email campaigns you should be sending that gives you good ROI for your efforts: the re-engagement campaign.
2. Create re-engagement campaigns that deliver results
The re-engagement campaign not only improves the results you’ll see from your email marketing campaigns because it turns inactive contacts into active ones, but you’ll also drop the contacts that remain inactive.
This means the percentage of your opens, click-throughs, and conversions will increase, leading to better ROI and better inbox placement for the active subscribers you have left.
In order to win back inactive subscribers, follow these tips:
Remind your subscribers of your value
It’s a cinch to create a re-engagement offer that impresses your subscribers and reminds them why they signed up to hear from you in the first place.
Remember, this is a pull out all the stops offer, so be sure you are giving them the most bang for their buck here.
Laugh it up
A bit of humor doesn’t hurt, and it can go a long way toward establishing a playful, personal relationship with your customers, as long as that humor remains consistent with your brand voice across all your marketing platforms.
Urban Outfitters hits it out of the park with their re-engagement email.
It’s hard to be annoyed at an email that speaks the language of the online shopper with its text-based motif. This email also does a great job of speaking directly to its targeted audience with the teen-centric text messaging.
Remember their special day
Nothing personalizes your efforts to connect with customers better than creating an email that remembers a milestone like a birthday or the anniversary of the first time they ordered from you.
Celebrating these moments is a good way to get yourself back in their good graces, and back in their inbox.
Here’s one that celebrates a birthday:
These re-engagement emails help customers feel noticed and valued, while the discounts and special offers encourage subscribers to give your brand another try.
Even if you missed the big day, you can recover with a dash of humor, like this:
Play a game
With the viral popularity of games like Farmville or Candy Crush, people are accustomed to playing games on their smartphones and tablets, so gamifying your email is a great way to capture their attention and boost engagement.
You can gamify with a scavenger hunt, a puzzle, or any number of ways that will entertain, intrigue, and keep your subscribers looking forward to your next email.
Here’s how one restaurant does it:
Gamification is emerging as a digital marketing trend, with more and more marketers—and customers—expressing interest.
And it works, because the more customers play, the more the game’s reinforcing a behavior or habit which, in the case of gamified emails, means continued engagement with your brand.
Don’t forget the content
The one thing that really drives engagement with your email marketing is high-quality, valuable content.
If you’ve been seeing your unsubscribe numbers going up, you might want to re-think your content strategy and work on creating some stunning new pieces.
Here are a handful of tips to help with content creation:
- Provide unique content
- Segment your audience for targeted content
- Be the authority on your subject
- Be controversial
- Reward engagement
- Be transparent
- Know what the competition is offering
Once you’ve determined what you want to offer—white papers, ebooks, discounts, tips and tricks, cheat sheets, etc.—then you can work on making it creative, entertaining, interactive, and shareable.
Wrap up
While these are just two of the major email campaigns you should be sending, they are two that can give you the most reward for your marketing effort.
A welcome campaign is essential since it sets the tone for your future relationship with your customer and positions your brand to be a trusted asset. Since most customers expect to be welcomed, not running a welcome email campaign might cause them to reconsider.
Likewise, a good re-engagement email will help recover lost revenue from dried out leads, renew interest and engagement in your brand, and even encourage social sharing and forwarding.
Using entertaining techniques like gamification in re-engagement campaigns can help reinvigorate bored subscribers and encourage increased interest from your biggest fans.
When you don’t have a lot of time to create and test myriad email campaigns, focusing on these two heavy-hitters is a great way to ensure your brand stays clearly in your customers’ sights.
