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With over four billion email users worldwide, email marketing has become one of the most sought-out digital marketing techniques. It allows brands to develop and maintain a connection with their audience, raise brand awareness, and convert leads. Marketing emails can also be more consistent than other digital marketing methods as they require little time, effort, and cost and work in the long run.

But creating a winning email marketing campaign requires more than collecting customer email addresses (though your opt-in strategy is imporant). A successful email marketing campaign requires detailed planning and efficient execution.

Below, we have provided a step-by-step guide to creating winning email marketing campaigns with email marketing examples. It doesn’t matter if you are a novice or expert at email marketing; read on to find an easy guide with practical tips:

Set a Goal

The first step to creating a winning email marketing campaign is to define its purpose. A clear and specific purpose or goal significantly helps in the later stages of the campaign. Without a goal, you won’t have a direction, and every step’s outfit will be messy and incoherent.

An email marketing campaign can have the following goals:

• Raising brand awareness
• Generating revenue
• Collecting feedback
• Enhancing traffic
• Initiating conversations

Email marketing campaign goals are not limited to the above example. A particular company can have any goal for its email marketing campaign, depending on its business needs.

But the above email for marketing examples is generic and cannot direct the team. You can make them specific by adding the extent of the desired result and the period during which the goal must be achieved. By adding these specifics, the goals can look like this:

• Raising brand awareness by 12% by the next quarter
• Generating revenue by 15% by the mid-year
• Collecting feedback for the new product line
• Enhancing traffic on the website blog section by 8% by the year-end
• Initiating conversations for the new product launch

Remember: the more specific your goal is, the more chances of success you can ensure for the campaign. Here’s our deep dive into email marketing benchmarks like clickthrough rate which can help you set some targets.

Define the Audience

You can’t send the same marketing email to each audience member. Marketing emails provide a personalized, human touch to the company, which is why they always focus on building a relationship with the audience.

To create a winning email marketing campaign, you must smartly categorize your list of audience email addresses. Take some help from analytics software such as Google Analytics to get detailed result reports on your previous marketing emails. If you are looking to launch your first email marketing campaign, you can still segment your subscribers according to the product categories they found interesting, their geography, age, or gender, and how much time they spent on your website.

Once you have the audience segmented, you can choose the category or categories that would help you achieve your goal the most efficiently. For example, if you have distributed your audience segments by age, you can choose audiences aged 25-35 to generate revenue since they have the most spendable income. Similarly, you can select the audience segment aged 15-25 to increase brand awareness. As the latter segment will have enough spendable income in the coming years, it will benefit your brand to build a relationship with them in advance.

A successful email for marketing example is Airbnb. Airbnb sends geographically targeted marketing emails in which it suggests to audiences beautiful Airbnb homes close to their location for a small staycation. If you’re a startup, check out our email tips for startups.

Decide the Campaign Type

Once you have selected an audience segment, it’s time to decide the way the campaign will approach the selected audience. You can accomplish this task by analyzing the audience data and finding a common pattern.

Let’s consider an email for marketing example of Duolingo. Duolingo is a language-learning software. It frequently focuses on the audience segment that hasn’t visited it in a while. The marketing emails directed at this audience segment are to remind them to keep learning. These email titles begin as Keep Improving! or Learn More! to remind the audience of their progress with the software.

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Alternatively, Duolingo can send a survey or feedback request as a marketing email to learn why the users stopped using the software. However, a campaign based on consumer responses may fail. Ex-users who quit out of lack of motivation or finding the new language difficult may not want to answer. Similarly, other ex-users may simply have gotten busy and may not want to answer, as it would make them feel bad about giving up on their goal. Receiving little to no responses will not prove helpful or convert any leads.

On the other hand, the campaign type that focuses on calling ex-users back can act as a positive reminder for the busy and hope for the demotivated ones. Hence, marketers can have multiple campaign options for the same audience, but they can benefit greatly from choosing a positive and uplifting one.

Personalize the Email

Let’s continue with the email for marketing example of Duolingo. The title beginnings for Duolingo reminder emails were mentioned in the above step. While these beginnings may seem like complete titles to some, they can be impersonal, uninteresting, and plain to others.

Duolingo does not settle for uninteresting and impersonal emails, which is part of what makes it one of the best language-learning software in the world. Duolingo emails are personalized for each subscriber. The company uses help from advanced email marketing services to include the name of each user and the language they were learning. It also includes the time or steps these users could take to reach the next stage of fluency.

Including the personalized details turns the Duolingo marketing email titles as Keep Improving your French, Kate! Complete two more steps to reach the intermediate level. The body copy for Duolingo reminder emails is usually a link to pick up the practice right where the user stopped.

Duolingo provides excellent examples of personalized emails. However, it is not the only company that does so. Any brand can connect to its audience members deeply by personalizing the marketing emails. Another great email marketing example for personalized copy includes cart abandonment emails. These emails are sent to customers who added items but didn’t complete the purchase. Brands can send audience effective reminder emails to complete their purchase before the stock runs out.

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Select the Right Time

Time is one of the most important factors for any marketing campaign, especially post COVID-19. Just like you won’t put up Christmas sale billboards after Christmas has passed, you can’t send emails for Christmas sales either.

Digital marketing is about grabbing audiences’ attention at the right time and place. Software and programs like Google Analytics and Facebook Ads use advanced technology to map consumer behavior and track their preferences. You can utilize these programs to learn the right timing for every marketing email you plan to send.

While email marketing campaigns can have different goals for the brand, they all seek the same thing from the consumer, i.e., maximum engagement. Hence, it is beneficial to send out emails to your audience when they are most likely to read them. One study found that smartphone users check their emails most on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. This data isn’t surprising, considering they are the busiest weekdays. During these days, users from all walks of life expect emails on work updates, study schedules, online tracking of orders, etc.

Similarly, you don’t want to send marketing emails at 2 am when the audience is most likely to be asleep. The best times are 10 am, 2 pm, and 8 pm. During these times, the audience is awake and active and is most likely to engage with your email. Moreover, marketing emails must provide the audience with a couple of days to take the action they inspire. Marketing emails that create urgency can trigger or upset audiences and lose subscribers.

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As mentioned earlier, marketing emails are primarily used to build, strengthen, and maintain a relationship with the targeted audience. Every other goal they deliver is secondary. Keeping in mind the primary purpose, anyone can design a winning email marketing campaign in the above-explained five simple steps.

Writing compelling copy, adding aesthetically pleasing visuals, and designing the email beautifully are also essential steps. The content and design for all emails in an email marketing campaign should be cohesive. Keeping the emails short, straight-forward, and focused also works. Moreover, the emails must be designed for both web and smartphone browsers and tested before sending out. Following up and testing the metrics during the campaign also allows for improved marketing strategies in the future.

Last but not least, crafting a successful email marketing campaign can get easier by integrating it with other marketing methods to provide a holistic experience to the audience.