Hot Tips For Your First Email Marketing Campaign

You can’t avoid having an email address these days, no matter how curmudgeonly you attempt to be. And with everyone having an email, it’s the best place to market your business to new and existing Customers.



Faster than snail mail, and with greater reach than even Facebook, a well built email marketing campaign can be a boon to any Small Business. Today we’re going to look at how you can build yours to be as effective as it can possibly be.

Have A Clear Purpose Before You Begin

The easiest way to sabotage your email marketing campaign is to rush into it without stopping to consider why you’re launching it. If you don’t have a clear purpose and concrete goals, you’ll inevitably wander off track and waste your time and that of your Customers.

Having a clear directive you can refer back to when planning and building your campaign is essential to getting the results you’re looking for. What your aim for your campaign is will depend upon the exact nature of your business, but there are a couple of common goals.

Increasing sales on your website is a common goal if you deal in Ecommerce, your campaign drives people to your website, and then they make a purchase.

You can also focus simply on driving traffic to your website, which is always a great thing to have for any Small Business.

Promoting limited time events, special offers, and major new updates to your business is another common set of goals, and one that’s especially well suited to email campaigns. Everything recipients need to know about what you’re offering can be easily contained within a single email, they don’t need to go anywhere else unless it’s to make a booking or a purchase.

Whatever the aim of your campaign, make sure you keep it firmly fixed in your mind as you proceed.

Pick A Format That Suits Your Purpose

Once you know what the aim of your campaign is, you need to decide what form your campaign will take. Each approach has different pros and cons, so you need to weigh them all carefully and pick the one that works best with your aims.

A Newsletter campaign is one where emails are sent out to subscribers on a regular basis, most often monthly, though weekly and quarterly are also valid schedules if they suit your industry. These are great for promoting products and services, keeping Customers informed of changes and additions to your business, and generally building and maintaining relationships with your Customers.

A Special Offer email campaign is one that contains information about some sort of limited time promotion. Discounts, sales, free shipping, VIP clubs, these are all examples of this kind of marketing. A key feature of this format is that there will be a prominent link featured along with the announcement to enable them to make a purchase immediately.

Very similar is the Invitation format, which looks much the same but isn’t necessarily about a product. As an invitation to a special event it can be about the launch of a new product, but it can also be about the opening of a new store, a festival, a seminar, or any of a dozen other things. The big difference is that instead of inviting recipients to purchase something, the focus is on inviting them to attend (and possibly book a ticket).

Make It Immediately Arresting

Now comes another important part of the process, building the campaign to be irresistible. You don’t have long to convince someone to read your whole email, only a few seconds, so you need to make sure you’re grabbing their interest immediately.

Make use of attractive images and keep your written content to only what is necessary. Avoid having blocks of text, these bore and intimidate readers, leading them to deleting your email instead of reading it.

Make sure it’s super easy for recipients to follow through on whatever course of action you’re pushing for, make links to checkout and booking pages easy to locate, and keep the process on the other side of those links as simple as possible.

Remember that Customers hate spending effort on things, make sure everything is  as effortless as possible.

Study The Results Carefully

So you’ve successfully planned, designed, and built, and launched your campaign. Take a moment to congratulate yourself before starting on the final task, studying the results. If you got the response you were hoping for, that’s great. If you didn’t, that’s fine, we can still make use of that.

Whatever the outcome of your campaign, it’s important to follow up on those results and use them to do better next time.

Refine your mailing list, improve your copy, rework your timing, all of these are important to building the best campaign you possibly can, and all of them need hard evidence to guide their decision making.

Both success and failure can teach you helpful lessons if you’re willing to learn.

Congratulations! You’re all set to make your first email marketing campaign a good one. Keep learning from the lessons your campaigns teach you, and you’ll only get better.