Fifteen Simple Steps to Create and Send Your Email Marketing Campaign

Here are the major steps below that show and describe exactly how to create and send a successful email marketing campaign:

1) Conceive your reason to send. Are you sending a weekly newsletter, a flash update, a coupon or special discount, a specific promotion, a financial report, a stock market update, a blog post notification, a compelling sales letter? Depending on the nature of your email communications to your clients or prospects, it will affect the style and length of your email message, as well as any call to action.

2) Write your copy (text). Write a minimum of one paragraph, and probably several more. If your message is long, some of your writing should probably be placed on your web site, or a blog post that you can link to from your email message (this process increases your subscriber engagement, as they click on your email to read the rest of your article).

3) Collect or create appropriate images for your newsletter. Know that images of people are almost always preferred over static images of things and objects. Visual interest is important to encourage readers to stay engaged with your email message.

4) Choose a newsletter template. Your email marketing provider will have several html email templates and themes to choose from to reflect positively on your organization and message. Your template should be responsive, meaning that your message will display properly on mobile devices (phones), tablets, laptops, and desktop computers.

5) Branding. Try to match your branding to your email template, and your company logo. So, for example, if you are a bank, you will want to choose conservative, trustworthy colors and images for your email messages. If you are a nightclub or bar, you'll want to choose a theme that reflects the nature of your club and the mood that you want to capture and share.

6) Subscriber segments. Will your message go out to all your subscribers, or just a segment or subset of your subscribers? Perhaps you want your message to go out just to people who you have communicated with over the last three years. Perhaps a separate email will go out to those subscribers who have been with you three years or longer. Or perhaps you want separate emails to go out to those who have purchased from you, and those who have not. The possibilities are endless. The thing to remember is that you will have your best success with targeting messages sent to different people on your email mailing list.

7) Check for relevancy. Is your email message relevant to the recipient? Try to make your message as relevant and engaging as possible, for highest rates of response. High relevancy is one of the most important things you can do for continued high engagement and response. 

8) Craft an interesting email subject line. Also consider your mailfrom address and replyto address. For example, will you send from  Jane Johnson <JaneJ@nonprofit.org> or will you send from  NonProfit Organization <info@nonprofit.org>? Will your email come from your personal name or your company or organization? It's important to get the small things right, and make sure that people will recognize and expect your email when it arrives.

9) Consider your call to action. Every good email should have a call to action, that is if you are wanting to generate response from your efforts. The response can be something like visit a web site, purchase an item, use a coupon, request a consultation, or forward the message to a friend.

10) Send test emails to your review team. Send your email to coworkers, friends, and others who can check things for you and give you honest feedback and critique.

11) Links and Landing Pages. Check all links, and your landing pages (if any). Make sure your images look correct. Check that the email looks good on various devices.

12) If needed, get final approval before you send. If your supervisor or others need to sign off on your email campaign, don't forget to do that before you send.

13) Review performance reports. After a day or two has passed, most of your recipient data will be complete. Most people by then will have opened and read your email, and your email statistics will show those results.

14) Statistics to review normally include things like: number of messages sent, number received, delivery rate percentage, number of unique opens and open rate percentage, number of unique clicks and click rate percentage, number of bounces or unsubscribes, and more.

15) Assessment. Meet with stakeholders to determine the level of success you achieved. Were your expectations met, or exceeded? How could you do better next time? Could you improve on your subject line, call to action, images, or offer?

Those are the fifteen key steps to create and send your email marketing campaign. If you would like help with your email campaign feel free to contact us today.