How to run a successful email campaign in 5 steps

Even if some companies still doubt its effectiveness, email marketing remains an essential tool in a marketing strategy. Email marketing allows you to convert your prospects into customers and to keep them coming back.

Email marketing consists in creating professional emails adapted to the expectations and behaviors of your target audience, in order to meet your marketing or commercial objectives.

But you still need to know how to create effective emailing campaigns and use this specific marketing channel.

To reap hypothetical benefits, it is necessary to think your email marketing strategy in detail, and before launching email marketing campaigns, it is essential to know your target audience and your buyer personas.

Then, you still have to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.

This is what we will talk about in the following article.

Here are the 5 essential steps to develop effective emailing campaigns in 2022:

Step 1: Determine your objectives and analyze your target
Before taking any action, you need to determine campaign objectives and know which target audience these objectives are going to target.

The first question to ask yourself is, “Why am I going to create an email marketing campaign?”

Of course, for most businesses, the end goal may come down to making sales.

However, that is an end in itself, not a specific objective. This much sought-after end is composed of several objectives, some of which can be achieved through email marketing.

For example, to increase the turnover of your business, you need to make your brand and your products or services more visible, gain new market shares, generate more traffic on your e-commerce platform or website, convert more of your prospects, sign more contacts, etc.

These are the objectives.

Now you have to identify your target audience.

The creation of emailing campaigns is an incredible marketing opportunity to get your message across. This message must be both attractive and understandable.

To transmit the right message, you must know your target audience inside out.

What are their needs, issues, and expectations? How do they behave?

What are their concerns and interests?

You must correctly determine the profile of your target audience to succeed in your emailing campaign.

To create an effective emailing strategy, it is also essential to segment your contact list in order to best adapt your message.

Only a thorough study of your target audience will allow you to segment it in an optimal way.

Moreover, it is essential to take into account the different degrees of maturity of your prospects before sending them the perfect e-mail.

A consumer who has just become aware of his need will not have the same expectations in terms of communication as someone who has already compared several solutions.

Step 2: Make a good first impression

As you probably know, you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. This determines everything that follows, and it’s true for your email marketing campaigns as well.

In order to create email marketing campaigns that will help you reach your goals, you must do everything possible to get your emails opened by the recipients!

If your recipients don’t open your emails, they don’t read them. So you can be sure that you won’t get any additional orders to your website or visits to your blog.

Here are some tips to incorporate to help your campaign open rates:

Use a personal identity such as your first and last name or company name to indicate the identity of the sender
The subject of the e-mail must be clear and concise. Your title should not be too long to be read in full from a smartphone.
Take advantage of the pre-header to give additional context to your email. The pre-header is the first line of text in your email, usually below the subject line in the email box.
The day and time of sending are two other criteria that have a direct influence on the open rate. There is no optimal time to send e-mails, it varies according to the sectors of activity, the type of business (BtoB, BtoC, etc.) and the targeted public. You still have to test to see which days and times of the day are appropriate to send your emails.


Step 3: Offer your recipients quality content


If you’ve managed to convince recipients to open your email, that’s a good start.

Now you need to entice them with quality content in order to pique their interest, and make them want to take action.

Thus, creating effective emailing campaigns inevitably requires relevant content.

Relevant content meets two requirements: first of all, it must be clearly linked to the subject of your e-mail. The content of the subject line is a promise made to the recipient and the content must live up to it.

Secondly, your content must be adapted to your target audience: what content are they looking for? What time of day do they read their emails? From what types of devices (mobile, tablet, desktop)?

We often hear marketers say that a relevant communication strategy, in the age of the Internet and social networks, is only 20% promotional content for 80% high value-added content.

So don’t drown your audience with promotional email marketing campaigns. You won’t get the expected returns.

Provide them with content that adds something extra, whether it’s informative, educational, entertaining, or news-related.

If content is king, consider also the form. This is another important condition for the success of your marketing approach.

Emails are more and more read on tablets and smartphones. To create the perfect email campaign, you need to think very carefully about the design.

A good email contains relevant images that perfectly illustrate the text, because the truth is that the vast majority of emails are not read in their entirety.

It is often the visual elements that persuade people to click.

Be careful, however, because inserting too many images can have a negative impact on your deliverability rate. In fact, an email overflowing with images will be considered as spam and will not even reach your audience’s inbox.

You must therefore be particularly attentive to the image/text ratio of your email.

The image/text ratio should clearly tip in favor of the text, but the text should also not be too long.

Think about the objective of your email and the expectations of your target to stay focused on a short but punchy message.

Step 4: Encourage your target to act


At this stage, your target has received your email, opened it and even read it. But the hardest part is yet to come, because the objective has not yet been met.

You must now “conclude” by trying to convince your target to take action. To do this, you need to work on two key points: the CTA, (Call-To-Action) and the landing page.

The Call-To-Action is a button that invites the user to take action. The most traditional ones simply contain a few words or phrases such as: “buy now”, “add to cart” or “sign up”.

The Call-To-Action should punctuate your message and represent the fulfillment of your initial promise (the subject line).

But, the objective of your email marketing campaign is probably not just a simple click. You need to convert that click and that requires an optimal landing page.

A landing page is a web page where the person who clicked on the CTA button in your email lands. In order to achieve a maximum conversion rate, it must be thought out in great detail, because the success of your campaign depends ultimately on the quality of your landing page.

Step 5: Analyze and optimize your email campaigns


To create the perfect email campaign, it is essential to analyze each of your campaigns.

No one creates a perfect email marketing campaign on the first try.

As we’ve seen in the first 4 steps, an email campaign is made up of different ingredients, all equally important.

To analyze your campaigns, you need to determine the KPIs (key performance indicators) that will allow you to measure the performance level of your initial objective.

Here are the main indicators to follow in an emailing campaign to measure its results:

The deliverability rate: it allows you to measure the quality of your email address base. It is the number of delivered emails divided by the number of sent emails.
The opening rate: it is the number of opened emails divided by the number of delivered emails. If your open rate is low, it means that your contacts perceive you as an uninteresting advertiser or worse, a spammer.
Click-through rate: this is the number of clicks divided by the number of emails delivered.
Reactivity rate: this is perhaps the most relevant indicator. It allows you to concretely measure the interest of your campaign and the relevance of your message. The reactivity rate is the number of clicks divided by the number of opened emails.
The churn rate is the number of unsubscribes divided by the number of emails sent.
These key indicators allow you to analyze the effectiveness of your emailing campaign.

Then, it is up to you to draw the right conclusions to improve your future campaigns. For this, you can use the A/B Testing method.

As its name indicates, A/B testing consists of testing two variants of your campaign to determine the optimal recipe.

You will need to create an A and a B version of your email marketing campaign.

Then select two samples from your contact database and send version A to one and version B to the other.

Afterwards, analyze the statistics of your two versions.

All that remains is to send the most effective version to the rest of your database.

Done on a regular basis, A/B Testing will bring you closer to a near perfect email marketing strategy.

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