It is common for online sellers and small business owners to struggle in looking for a cost-efficient and effective method to market their brand to a wider audience. Fortunately, we are in an era where we can easily access the Internet– we can easily send direct mails to our target audience.
Whether you are inviting people for your grand opening or telling them to try your new product, an effective email marketing campaign is the key. You need to know the fundamentals of email marketing to create an efficient marketing plan. Efficiently creating your campaign will help you promote and grow your business, increase revenue, and boost sales.
Table of Contents
- Create an Effective Email Marketing Plan
- Identify and Understand Audience
- Use Signup Forms
- Create Groups – Organize Lists by Segment
- Know What to Write
But, how can you create an effective email campaign? Here’s when MailChimp comes in. They provide beautiful designs, automation, and personalization to your email campaigns. Personalized and compelling emails will strengthen your relationship with existing and potential customers.
More so, since it is automated, you can easily connect it to your online store or website to help you collect helpful e-commerce data for your customers. You can monitor the order history, their spending, and whether they are repeating customers or first-timers. With the collected data, you can easily personalize and target the campaigns that will direct traffic back to your store and generate more sales.
How to Have a Successful Email Marketing Campaign?
Well, one way to attain success is through having concrete plans, right? So, to have a successful marketing campaign, you need to…
Create an Effective Email Marketing Plan
If you are not familiar with what your email marketing plan will be, don’t worry about it– we are here to guide you all throughout your planning.
Operating a business is not an easy task, there are several things to consume, and tasks pile up on your plate. With this, we want you to easily plan your marketing campaign. So, we went ahead and outlined some best practices that you may consider when you are creating your strategies for the email marketing campaigns.
Would it be a success? If you are doing it right, we promise you– your time and effort will pay off, and your marketing plan will be worth it.
Identify and Understand Your Audience
No matter what your products or services are, you have to know who your target audience is. If you know and understand your audience, you can effectively communicate with them. You might see it as an easy task– but, in reality, it is the most important one for business owners. To have a successful campaign, you have to understand the demographics of your brand audience.
MailChimp allows you to take further research to identify your audience and segment them into specific categories. If you segment your audience, you can send them personalized emails.
Personalized emails do not start with “Dear Customer,” it starts with “Dear [Your Name]”. That way, the readers would feel that the email is addressed to them. It helps increase engagement and generate higher ROI.
As soon as your subscribers are added to your list, they will provide a handful of information about their interests and buying behavior. MailChimp allows marketers and business owners to customize fields in their signup forms. So, you can collect every information you need– age, gender, interests, or subscription preferences.
You would know if your customer only wants to receive emails when there is a specific sale of a product, or some would want to have biweekly updates. See, this little step can make you know more about your customers.
Use Signup Forms
One of the most valuable data your signup form offers is how and where the subscribers sign up for your list. If you own an e-commerce business and you connected it to MailChimp, you can determine where your customers joined the list. With this, you will know how to communicate with them and where you should focus your marketing efforts.
Let’s take this as an example: You placed a signup form over Facebook and Twitter. With MailChimp’s statistics, you noticed that more forms are being generated on the form you shared via Facebook. Thus, in this manner, you would want to focus on reaching out to your customers through Facebook.
Also, you can create segments to target people who joined through specific methods. Also, if there is a specific page that you would want to track for your signup forms, you may do so. You only have to add a hidden field to your embedded form and insert it on the page you want.
Create Groups – Organize Lists by Segment
Within your large audience, you can identify who have the same interests and buying habits. From there, you can create smaller groups of your audience. Within their groups, you can send relevant campaigns that are related to their interests and habits.
Remember: If you distribute a relevant campaign, you will earn better results.
Creating groups is an easy method to organize the number of subscribers into categories. You only have to maintain a single list for each. For example, you have three groups of people to track. Adding them to groups whom they have a similar interest will help you save money.
Take advantage of the segmentation tools offered by MailChimp. It will help increase the click-through rates and e-commerce orders generated by your campaigns.
Know What to Write
Now, it is time to decide what you will write in your email. What would your content be about? Think about what you want to say to your audience. You need to send an email with a purpose, an email that would really connect with your subscribers. So, keep in mind what they have signed up for. It might be best to outline the general content types that you can use in your campaigns, so you can look into it when you write and design your emails.
What does your audience expect? Your audience signed up for a reason, they might be expecting something from you. Try to meet, or best exceed their expectations by creating a personalized email. You can send them:
- News Coverage or Press Release
- Shopping Guides
- Featured or New Products
- Popular Posts
- Upcoming Events
- Special Discounts
Before you create the content, make sure that your customers will find the topic interesting. Make it engaging and let them share it with their friends by adding a social sharing option to your campaign.
Final Thoughts
What works today might not be effective tomorrow. You have to take the time to revise your plans. There might be several challenges along the way, but in the long run, it will give you better engagement, satisfied customers, and drive revenue.