A Simple Guide to Setting up Your First Email Campaign

Chhavi Firani 09/02/2018 Email Marketing 6

You’ve probably realised that email marketing can work wonders for your business, like it does for 59% of marketers who consider it as their most effective channel of revenue. (WordStream)

For the simple reason that emails serve as a highly personalised mode of communication between you and your customers.

You can send an email about anything from your new product to a special discount coupon code, and everyone in your email list will come to know about it whether they have visited your site or not.

With all its benefits, setting up an email campaign can feel like a sack full of tasks, all of which need a coherent strategy. So, if you’re new to email campaigns, we will give you a simple tutorial on how to get the important things right, and from here you can improvise further as much as you wish.

Various Elements of an Email Campaign

Purpose
Email List Generation
The Subject Line
Email Content
Finding an email Service
Hit send!

So let’s start

Purpose

Think of ways in which you can leverage email marketing. This could be anything from sending out product catalogues if you’re an ecommerce business or writing about your newest blog post if you’re an industry influencer.

Maybe you can send out emails to stay in touch with your subscribers and prepare them for an upcoming sale on your store, the uses are endless, but it’s important you pick one.

As soon as you’ve highlighted a fitting purpose for sending out an email, something that your subscriber will be really interested in, step one is done.

Email List Generation

What's the most important thing you need to be able to send an email? Yes, an email address. You need to provide a way to your audience through which they can submit their email addresses to you. The most effective way to do this is by introducing an email subscription box on your website.

There is a complete science to creating subscription boxes that can get hard on your brain depending upon your coding knowledge. If you don’t have a website yet, we can help you out with whole process of web design and email newsletter design, while you focus on other important things.

If you already have a website and it runs on WordPress, you can refer to this plugin guide for making a subscription box in minutes.

Be creative with the design of the subscription box and make it blend in well with the theme of the website. A good-looking subscription box can be one of the major factors in influencing someone to entrust their email address with you.

The Subject Line

After you have enough number of email addresses that you can call it a list, it’s time to design what goes inside your first email newsletter.

The second most important thing on an email is the subject line. It is also the first thing that your recipients will notice about the email, which is why, it has to hook the reader right from the beginning.

Example 1

Example 2

You can tell the difference yourself, from Example 1 and Example 2. Writing a plain subject line that does what it says is cool but writing a subject line that engages with you and makes you inherently interested in the email’s contents, is something you can aim for.

Email Content

After mastering the subject line, we’re headed to the place where the actual conversion has to take place - the email body. Unlike emails written for business and personal messages, your campaign will need a balanced combination of text, images and lucrative formatting.

Here are some rules to compose an effective email

Brevity - Most people want to get through the email at lightspeed, hence, you must use only very important things in your email. As a matter of fact, an effective email doesn’t contain more than 150 - 200 words of text.

Scannable Formatting - Make it easy for the reader to scan the email by

Breaking the text in short paragraphs containing no more than two lines.
Using bullet points for listable items.
Emboldening, italicizing, or underlining stressworthy points.
Inserting a relevant image between every two blocks of text.

Personalization - If you collect user’s name alongside the email address, it’ll be great to personalise each email by addressing them with their name directly. Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened. – Campaign Monitor

Use of images - One of the keys to successful emails is professionally designed email templates. Have a look at this one made by Dikonia.

Email Service

Recognizing the potential of this market, a lot of companies such as GoDaddy and Vertical Response came up with email marketing automation tools that make managing email campaigns a breeze.

Here are some important things you should know about these services

Most services provide a free plan that will suit almost every beginner campaign. These are however constrained to the number of email addresses and number of emails you can send. For instance, Mailchimp provides for up to 2,000 subscribers. Send up to 12,000 emails per month. No expiring trial.

Most email marketing services will come with a built-in email template design tool that will take off the design worries from your head.

All marketing services allow for importing your subscriber list into the campaign backend. A few will integrate directly with your subscription box and store the contacts in the backend.

Email Campaigns can be timed. You can create campaigns that will fire on a set date and time automatically repeatedly every month or you can manually fire them at will whenever you want.

If you are unsure of which service to choose, this tool provides a wide comparison of all popular email marketing service at a single place.

Hit Send!

Waittt… just before hitting send, make sure to revise the email content and always send out a few test emails to check if everything is fine.

Sometimes, the emails will not land in the subscriber’s primary inbox or even in the promotions tab and will straightaway go to the spam folder. This is something very important to test and thankfully your email service will have a solution for this.

Pro-tip: Use coveted email service providers such as Gmail and Outlook as the “sender” in the email campaign. This will eradicate most of such issues.

Now, you’re all set to trigger your first email campaign, go ahead and hit send!

While you are capturing email addresses, we can make your email game real strong with our digital design services. After all, emails work 40 times better for acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter.

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Chhavi Firani

Tech Expert

Chhavi is the Founder and Partner at Dikonia. She is passionate about delivering beyond expectations and crafting rewarding experiences. Her company provides innovative IT solutions including custom SaaS offerings that streamline workflow as well as development and design services in keeping with latest buying and market trends. Chhavi holds a Master of Computer Applications from Punjabi University.

A Simple Guide to Setting up Your First Email Campaign