Top Techniques for Creating A Solid Email Marketing Campaign

When in the process of setting up a small business and marketing it for more sales, it’s important to look into all avenues of marketing to ensure you don’t miss out on any potential customers. One marketing method that’s used by many small businesses is email marketing. Email marketing is not only a cost effective strategy to use but has the potential to build a stronger relationship with your future customers. So how do you create a powerful email marketing campaign? This expert guide will give you the top techniques you can use to create a solid email marketing campaign.

Best Practices For A Great Email Marketing Strategy

Identify Your Target Audience

Identifying your target audience is the first thing you need to consider when creating a powerful marketing strategy. The idea of audience identification is so you don’t market your business to the wrong people who aren’t interested in what you have to offer. This just wastes your time and theirs. So how do you identify your target audience? The answer is audience segmentation. Audience segmentation is the process of breaking down your potential customer base and working out specific content that is targeted for them. You can start this break down process by placing your audience into selected categories. These categories include:

  • Demographics
  • Geographic locations
  • Behaviours
  • Psychographics

After this is completed you can then move on to identifying each trait. See below:

Socio Demographic

  • Ethnicity/language
  • Family size
  • Religion
  • Education
  • Marital status
  • Age
  • Occupation
  • Sex
  • Income

Psychographic

  • Opinions and attitudes
  • Preference
  • Personality
  • Activities
  • Benefits sought
  • Values

Behavioural

  • Readiness to change
  • Frequency of behaviour
  • Consistency of behaviour
  • Duration of behaviour
  • Relevant behaviour
  • Stages of change

Geographic

  • Rural
  • Community
  • Urban
  • Region
  • Peri-urban
  • District

Once you have worked on your main categories, you then need to narrow down your audience a little more.

Potential Audience

  • Women

Socio-Demographic

  • 20-30 years
  • Young mums

Geographic

Major cities – Urban

  • Brisbane
  • Sydney
  • Perth
  • Melbourne
  • Darwin
  • Hobart
  • Adelaide

Psychographic

  • Wants to have more time to go shopping
  • When shopping will spend more on the baby than themselves
  • Want to get their body back into shape
  • Looking for bargains

Behavioural

  • Doesn’t have a lot of time to themselves
  • Works hard
  • Juggling job/parenting
  • Confident

By understanding your audience more and targeting your content directly to your audience you have a higher chance of gaining more customers through your email marketing strategy.

Build A Powerful Landing Page/Subscription Form

Your email will direct your customers to a website or landing page. You need to make sure this landing page is professional and enticing to your audience. Some ways to make your subscription form or landing page more appealing to your audience is by:

  • Create an interesting and powerful call to action. Some examples could be ‘Save Now!’, ‘Be Exclusive Too’, ‘Be A Part Of Something’. Powerful call to actions such as these have a higher percentage of drawing in customers and click-through rates than ordinary call to actions such as ‘Call Now’ or ‘Click Here’.
  • Keep the content on the landing page to a minimum. Unless it’s an actual product page, contest page, or page which requires you to go into depth about what you’re offering, always keep the content to 200-300 words. You don’t need to write 500-1000 words. You want to keep it short so people aren’t too distracted to subscribe or click to the next page.
  • Remove any navigation points. Navigation points on a landing page is one of the major reasons why business website bounce rates are high. Providing a way to navigate away from what you’re trying to achieve will only distract your potential customers, and you don’t want that.
  • Use complimentary colouring and layouts to make your business landing page look professional and appealing. Take the time to match colours. Your layout should also be neat, tidy, and have good balance of text and white space. Never use coloured writing with a coloured back ground as this can make your page look cheap. Either black or white coloured text is fine.

Quality Content

Last, but not least, the content you place on your email is what helps to drive your customers into clicking through to your business or for them to subscribe. The content should be relevant with your audience based upon your segmentation criteria, and should be of high standards. To create content that’s to a high quality standard you will need to:

  • Make sure your content is free from grammar and spelling mistakes.
  • Make sure the content is unique. You can use Copyscape.com to check this.
  • Make sure the content is relevant to what you’re offering and to the person you’re offering it to. Don’t talk about other products if you have sales on a particular product. Also talk about your audience in the email. Example; ‘hey you busy mums out there’, ‘hey you busy dads out there’, or ‘hey you busy parents out there’. It will make it more personable and relatable.
  • Write with a purpose and tell people about the benefits they’ll receive.
  • Avoid over complicating the text. For example; instead of saying ‘ask us a question’ just say ‘just ask’ or something similar. If you can make some text shorter do so as this will keep the content more professional and less boring.
  • Don’t repeat things that you have said in the paragraph before.
  • Make sure layout and spacing is well thought out.

When you have created your email, send it to yourself to get an idea of what it will look like. This will give you indication on whether anything needs changing or modifying.

Overall

To create a solid email marketing strategy, you need to be able to make it stand out from your business competition. By incorporating these tips, you have a higher chance of gaining more customers through your email marketing efforts. So have you started your email marketing strategy yet?

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Aaron Gray
Aaron is the co-founder of Studio 56 and is a passionate digital marketing expert who has worked with some of the largest digital marketing agencies in Australia. He has been working in the digital marketing field for ten years. Aaron loves to travel the world to not only enhance his cultural experiences but learn and enhance his skills in the digital marketing industry. He is dedicated to helping others reach their online marketing goals.