Getting started with successful email marketing campaigns

Successful Email marketing campaigns

are a very popular way to reach your potential prospects and it is one of the inexpensive ways as well. Broadly you can define email marketing campaign as a series of emails a business uses to communicate with current and potential customers. Successful email marketing campaigns are used to initially create awareness and curiosity about the company’s products/services and then at an advanced stage are also used to persuade customers to engage with or make purchases from the company. In the initial days of the campaign, metrics like opens, clicks and hits to the landing page are something which marketers will track, but as you progress, and the channel becomes more mature, marketers will start relying on successful email marketing campaigns as a source of generating leads for your business.

On any given day, most of our email inboxes are flooded with a barrage of automated emails that do little else besides giving us another task to do on our commute to work – skimming through them or deleting them, or unsubscribing from these lists. But every now and then, we get successful email marketing campaigns that are so good, not only do we read it, but we click it, share it, and recommend it to our friends.

As a marketer, what do you do to make sure that you maximize the chances of your email being noticed and acted upon. To build, execute, and manage successful email marketing campaigns, you must pay close attention to your audience, the message, and avoid the common trap of simply blasting out self-promotional messages. In this post, we quickly try to cover important elements in ensuring that you are able to run and manage a successful email marketing campaigns. In this post, let’s get back to the basics and talk about how to build or manage the list to which you are sending campaigns to

Which email lists will you be sending this mail to?

If you don’t have a list, you cannot execute an email marketing campaign, Period. So if you are just about starting up and want to start reaching out to a bunch of prospects, you need to figure out how to get your lists going. Broadly, there are 3 ways you can solve this.

i) Buy Lists that you need

There are a lot of database vendors, from whom you can buy email lists for a specific target market. When you buy email lists, and send mails to them, this amounts to spamming and you run the risk of being tagged as a spammer. Besides, the quality of these lists, the accuracy of the email addresses provided is always a question mark. You can use email verification tools and before sending mails out, eliminate the email IDs, which are surely going to bounce. Even after doing that, you will realize that in most cases, the bounce ratio will be easily in the 10-15% range. If your bounce ratios are high, then it is quite likely that the email service provider you use to send your mails will suspend your account and you will have to make a lot of explanations to get the account active again.  Also, from our experience, lists that you purchase are usually 50-60% accurate, at best. So factor that in your consideration, when you are making list purchases. Having said all that I did, buying lists can get you moving on your email marketing program pretty quickly, as you will soon realize.

ii) Build lists that you need

You can have data researchers build the email lists for you, with clear specifications of the target market and possibly the companies, titles that you would like to include in the list. This is a person dependent activity. Some guys will get this research done quickly and can build 30-40 contact email addresses in an hour. Some others may be able to do only about 10-15 in a hour. There are tools available to search for specific segments and LinkedIn also serves as a great tool to identify the right people in organizations that matter to you. The lists that you will generate through this approach will again need to be verified before you can start sending email campaigns out to them.

iii) Get permission – Build opt-ins

This is one of the most popular way to build email lists. You will provide something useful to the recipients and get them to sign up on your opt-in forms at your digital assets, primarily your website and your blog. If you are providing something meaningful to your audience, then your prospects will not mind parting with their email address and contact information. As is obvious, to build an opt-in list takes effort, time and a clear strategy. It cannot be built overnight. But once built, you have a far better success rate with your opt-in lists, as your subscribers are already warmed up to you and they will actually welcome content coming in from you.

As you can see, getting your email lists up and ready is one of the first steps in planning  successful email marketing campaigns. We will cover several more topics like :

Stay tuned for further details.

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