6 Tips For a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

Another year, another blank slate for brand new email campaigns! If you’re like us, you’re planning out your year with various campaign topics to address. Before you finalize your email campaign strategy, check out these 6 tips for a successful email marketing campaign to make sure you’re on the track to success this year:

1. Identify your campaign goals

When creating a campaign, you need to identify the goals of that campaign. Who is the target audience? Start by thinking about what topic the email campaign is focused around. If the campaign is around personalization, you’ll want to think about for which type of audience that topic is relevant. For instance, the VP of Technology probably won’t be as interested as a Demand Generation Manager. Next, what do you want them to do- or think, what is the call to action? Think about the purpose of this campaign. How do you want the audience to react when reading the email? Is it meant to just be a sharing of knowledge via content? Or is the goal to get them to request a demo?

2. Determine the source of your data

Data plays a HUGE role in successful email campaigns; after all, your email campaigns are only as good as the data you have to fuel them! Before sending out an email campaign, determine the source of your data. Did you rent it or purchase it? Is it legacy data? How long has it been since that data has been scrubbed? What kind of data fields do you have? Maybe you have gaps in your data, or whitespace. Maybe you have really old email addresses. The number one thing you DON’T want when it comes to an email campaign is a high bounce rate. Imagine all your hard work being wasted because the emails in your database were out-of-date or entered incorrectly. Think about the time that was spent on the creative, the landing pages, the messaging, the strategy…it will essentially all be for nothing if it doesn’t actually reach the audience.

3. Develop an irresistible offer

You need an offer to overcome your prospects’ inertia and motivate them to take the desired action, like fill out your web form or register for your webinar. According to Demand Gen Report, the number one offer in B2B email marketing is a piece of downloadable content, such as a white paper or research report. This is because it’s a no-risk investment. You’re not asking for a demo or their business, you’re simply arming them with relevant content that may be of interest to them so they’re more likely to take the offer. Also, it’s helpful for the content to be gated with a landing page. The forms on the landing page allow you to collect new prospects’ contact information or additional hard-to-get data elements from current customers. That way it’s a win-win because the prospect/customer gets something (a piece of content) in return for their information, which is what you wanted!

4. Use your database to research

It is important to research the needs and interests of your target personas and develop compelling messages tailored to each. This tip goes hand in hand with #2. In order to use your database to research, you need to make sure the data is clean and accurate for use. Once your database is clean, you can use it to get information that will help you tailor compelling messages within your email campaign that are specifically targeted for your audience. Try running pivot tables in excel to identify the commonalities among your segments. *Shameless plug: or just partner up with Synthio and see how our database automation tool can do it for you.

5. Determine your touch strategy

Every email campaign is different and unique. You have different topics, different segments, and different goals. So another thing to think about is your touch strategy.  Will this be a multi-touch triggered email campaign? Will it be integrated with other campaign media, like direct mail, telephone, or business events? Think about how you want to be reaching your audience and plan for that in your email campaign.

6. Plan your metrics

You will want to see the metrics of this campaign so you can see what works and what doesn’t. Every email campaign is a learning experience and a clean slate for you as a marketer to try new ideas. The metrics will help guide the path for your future email marketing campaigns. That being said, your measurement of data methods and the post-campaign action steps need to be planned in detail for successful campaigns in the future.

There you have it! Follow these six tips and you’ll be sure to have a successful email marketing campaign. Let us know what tips work for you or if you have any other tips you think we should add to the list.