How To Run & Send Email Marketing Campaigns

Introduction

This is the world we live in right now in terms of resources for businesses:

• social media marketing;
• videos;
• podcasts;
• chatbots;
• A.I, and so on, and so on...

Why the … am I talking about how to run and send email marketing campaigns? Is this some type of a joke? Did I travel to the future from the past just to write this article?

Nah, I don't need to time travel, because emails are still relevant. And a study from Litmus shows that email marketing's return on investment is 38 USD for every 1 USD spent, on an average.

Are you still thinking that sending email marketing campaigns is a thing from the past? If your answer is still yes, you can stop here because I don't want to waste your time. But, if you got interested in learning more about how to create and send better email marketing campaigns in order to maximize your ROI, keep reading.

Before we go any further, let me remind you that the study was talking about average. And you have to put some work first if you want great results.

Another thing that I want to say upfront, I will talk more at a strategic level, and give some examples using SendX, but I will not get into specifics, like: What should you write on your emails, for example.

So without more BS, let's dive in.

1) Establishing Marketing Goals

Before you start asking people to sign up for your list or buy a subscription to an email marketing software, it's important to define the goals of your email marketing campaigns.

That will define how your individual emails will look like, what kind of content you will publish, what would be the frequency of sending emails etc.

For example, The Morning Brew's revenue is dependent on the advertisers who sponsor their newsletter so their aim is to get as much traffic to their newsletter as possible. Whereas, if someone is running a charity, their aim would be to get as many donations as possible from their list.

So define what is important to your overall business and how email marketing goals would align with that.

Here are a few examples of email marketing campaign goals:

1. Drive sales of eCommerce products
2. Get people to signup for a free trial
3. Get traffic to blog posts
4. Keep subscribers up to date with events, or new features.

2) Growing Your List is Part of the Game

After talking about all these rules, you might be thinking that you should just give up, it's too much pressure for a person to bear. Easy, easy… take a big breath, inhale… exhale. Good!

It may look like it, but if other people can learn them and send email marketing campaigns without breaking any rules, you sure can as well.

For example, now that we are talking about growing your list, a little reminder:

DON'T BUY A LIST AND DON'T AUTO OPT-IN PEOPLE IN YOUR LIST

How do you do it? Well, you can ask people that are already on your list to share your emails, and if your emails are interesting enough, people will share them with friends and family, and maybe some of them will decide to opt-in.

To ensure a higher share of your emails, you can "bribe" your list, giving them some incentive if they share with friends, like this:

Another tactic that you can explore is using social media in conjunction with your email marketing campaigns that you are sending. Helps for consistency, the same message in other channels, and it increases exposure - which will help with the campaign goals also.

But the tactic of the champions is to leverage the content you produce on your blog - even that your business requires people to register with their email in order to have access to your product or service; your blog is still a great source for converting people into a lead and then into a client using email marketing.

So how do you do this thing?

You can use popups and forms on your content, or landing pages with a conversion objective in mind, maybe something that Ryan Deiss calls a tripwire.

Let's use SendX as an example of how to create a popup that you can use on your blog, or on your product page to help you grow your list.

First, you go on the top of your page and click at Forms -> Popups.

After setting the name of your popup, you will choose a template:

Once you have a template that you like, it is time to start modifying its content:

Then you set the behavior for your popup: the animation, the conditions for your popup to display, the frequency…

After choosing how it will behave, it's time to choose where it will show up on your site.

And there you have it, a popup designed by you -  SendX gave you a big help by providing the templates, but nonetheless be proud of your work - now, go and start making that email list grow.

3) Creating the Copy & Design Before You Send Email Marketing Campaigns

This is probably the part most people think about when you talk about sending email marketing campaigns. And they are right when they give this so much credit. What you say, your copy, and how you present it, your design counts for a lot in an email.

We all admire those beautiful emails other businesses send us. We wish we were that good at HTML, CSS, and Photoshop. The truth is, you don't need to know all that to get similar results. Tools like SendX will provide you with email templates and a powerful drag-and-drop editor to modify those templates.

One of the advantages of having templates to choose from is that they are already responsive, which means that you will not have the problem of sending broken emails for the people who read your emails using a mobile phone.

Another good thing about templates is that they already use tried and tested email designs, and you just have to modify the content.

You may be tempted to design your own email since you didn't like any of the templates, and to spare you from headaches, you decided to put all the written content in the JPEG as well. You just have to upload the image and send.

I have this one thing to say to this genius idea of yours: PLEASE DON'T!

Some people, hell, a lot of people disable images from their emails, and a lot of services block images by default, and if people can't see anything to capture their interest, they will not enable the image to see your awesome design.

It's preferable to use backgrounds with some text that you can edit:

If you decide on a design that has embedded text in an image, you should make sure to have more text in the body of the email, to let people know what you are talking about in this email marketing campaign you sent them.

Another thing to have in mind is to write your email with a font size that people can read without much effort, 14px at least, and make it easier from them to skim through your email, like your blog posts.

4) Speaking of Visuals - Try Gifs and Videos

I don't know, but at this point maybe you have noticed that I love to use gifs on my contents. I love them in my emails also. A short gif animation can make your email come to life - remember the thing you talked about images above.

Another way to make your email marketing campaigns more interesting is by using video, they will not play directly in your inbox, but still.

There is this faux video concept that seems really cool if you want to test.

There are a lot of more things to discuss in this realm, but start with these tips that I just gave you, and then, when you gain more experience you can start digging and finding advanced stuff on your own.

5) Reading & Leveraging the Data Before/After Sending Email Marketing Campaigns

When you talk about data, people's eyes catch on fire and you can see A/B Testing just burning in there. This is how excited people get about the subject.

By the way some people write and talk about the subject on the internet, you may have the impression that you should test every single detail of your email - you could if you wanted to waste precious time.

Before you embark on this data journey, remember that you should define beforehand what success would look like to you. Because without that, you are measuring, segmenting and testing for nothing.

Rule of thumb: test your subject line, or something on your message that you are having a doubt about, but not everything.

Some metrics that you should pay attention to the email marketing campaigns that you send are:

• Open rates
• CTRs
• Bounces
• Unsubscribers
• Complaints

Another way to leverage data is by using them to segment your list, create automation, and send emails accordingly with the subscriber timezone - all things that you can accomplish with SendX.

Before you start exploring this data territory, I must remind you to get familiarized with all the rules and regulations we talked about in the beginning of this article.

6) Learn the Rules of Combat Before Sending Your First Email Marketing Campaign

It's tempting to see the numbers from a study, and want to just start to send email marketing campaigns, dreaming about all this money, glory, and fame that email will bring to your business. Not so fast though.

Before we even start thinking about what you are going to say to your list, first you will have to learn a few rules and laws.

Without knowing at least the basics you will damn sure set yourself for a lawsuit or a huge fine that will break you and your family for generations - not kidding, a fine in the EU could reach 20M dollars.

A great rule of thumb is to ALWAYS GET PERMISSION; it doesn't matter if you are good at finding email addresses on the web, or if you know someone that can sell you a really hot email list - don't do it.

The addresses on your list that you send email marketing campaigns have to opt-in, and you would do them a favor if you set the right expectation for them - tell them exactly how many times you will email them a day, a week, or a month.

To learn more specific rules and legislations about sending email marketing campaigns to your audience, you can:

• Check CAN-SPAM if you are in the US, or CCPA for California specifically
• Learn the rules for CANADA with CASL
• And the GDPR rules for the EU as well

7) Unsubscribing from this Article

Talking about how to run and send email marketing campaigns is a hard task. You can't put everything into a single article, and you have to find a balance between how much information you should give someone without overwhelming that person.

Sometimes you can even simplify too much, and write a shallow article, full of commonplaces, which is no bueno.

I sincerely tried to condense a lot of things that I know in this single article, gave some examples with SendX so it would be something concrete

I know I left a lot of things out, but I covered a lot of them as well. So I hope that with time you will discover other things related to email marketing, for example, integrate your email marketing service with your CRM.

It's all for now, see you guys soon.