How to Write an Effective Marketing Email Campaign, By: You

Jenn Cline • January 10, 2018

Not getting the email marketing results that you’d like? Trying to figure out how to measure the ROI on email marketing? You are not alone.

Every company thinks they need a newsletter (and they do), but making sure it is going to be effective is even more important than just sending out communications.

Ensuring there is a call to action and a measurement strategy in place before an email is sent is critical to the email’s success.

Before we go any further, let’s get something straight: Despite what some may say, email marketing works. You might come across a few articles with sensational headlines saying it’s all over for email marketing.

Go talk to an organization that has found a formula for email marketing that creates lots of new leads or sales. You know who they are. You have probably bought something from them because of a great email you received.

Marketers spend a great deal of time creating websites, building lists, studying demographics, crafting offers and developing calls to action. After all of that effort, they make a simple mistake. In fact, it’s something they probably complain about when they read their own email, yet they fail to ask it of their own emails.

You ready to ask yourself the hard question? Alright, here goes …

Would you want to read the kinds of emails you are sending?

Ask yourself that question. Really think about it. Are the emails you send the kind of thing you want to click on and read?

Now, you may not be a person with the same interests as your email list. You may not be your own target audience, so to speak. That’s not the point.

It’s about the content of the email. It’s about the message.

Do your emails have the tone of a person who is sharing something with a friend or colleague? Or do your emails have a feeling of a faceless marketing figure talking at people?

Targeting your lists will help with your success rate. Think about it: What do you do with emails that have absolutely no interest to you? I am a 5’ 2″ female and if I get an email for the Big and Tall store, I am probably not going to read it and wonder why I even got this.

Get as much information as you can in your database so segmenting is easy and, I promise, your emails will get higher clicks, pushing them further through your sales funnel.

Testing your emails for optimization is important these days as more and more of our potential customers look at their email on their phones or tablets.

Make sure you choose a template that is optimized for all platforms.

You don’t want to lose someone because text or graphics are cut off. Send and resend it to yourself, make sure all your links and calls to action are working properly.

Most times, this might be the first impression of your company to this prospect. Also, remember people are more apt to open something that is personalized to them. Programs make email personalization easy with the click of a button. Use this function – it will be worth it.

Here are some other questions to ask yourself about your emails:

• Is it valuable?
• Does it provide some useful information?
• Will it help the reader solve a problem?
• Does it have a takeaway?
• Did you engage them?
• Did you create a call to action?
• Did you warn them of potential risks?
• What is my ROI on my email marketing?

Think about any time you’ve signed up for an email list or subscribed to a newsletter of any kind. What were you hoping to get from it?

You were hoping to get something.

You wanted the newsletter or subscription to give your information that was helpful or valuable in some way, even if the value was giving you a quick laugh or making you feel like a part of something. You wanted someone who was part of that community or interest group to help you or provide something useful.

Now think about times when you unsubscribed from an email newsletter or updates. Why did you do it?

Did they not give you what you were hoping for? Did the emails sound phony or robotic? Maybe the emails smelled of a desperate money grab or a terrible sales pitch. Perhaps the links of call to action buttons did not work.

So, it comes back to the very simple question: Are you sending those kinds of emails to people?

You just identified something to help you improve. Now you can take a fresh look at your emails. You can start to think about ways to engage and provide value to the people you engage.

If you have to think about it, then you aren’t measuring your email campaigns correctly. You should know within hours of hitting send, if an email hit the goals you wanted.

Click-through rates are available in real time but, most importantly, your website should be the determining factor.

Click-through rates are important but not the end all – sales are the end all. Make sure you are tracking it all the way through to the sale!

Although it seems simple, oftentimes the answers people overlook are the simple ones.

Consider this a kind of golden rule for email marketing: Make sure you are sending the kinds of emails you’d want to read yourself and always measure their effectiveness!