How To Manage Your Email Campaigns Like A Pro

Email marketing campaigns can skyrocket your business. It’s a wonderful medium to reach a new audience, and convert your existing leads. However, success in email marketing doesn’t come easy.

So if you want to learn how to manage your email campaigns like a pro, stick around. We’ll look at what a good email campaign needs, the tools you’ll use, and what pitfalls to avoid.

Getting Started With An Email Campaign

Before you sign-up to Mailchimp and start sending emails in bulk, you need to clarify some “ground rules” for your marketing efforts. 

The most important one: your target audience.

Think about this: you’ll be performing a ton of different tasks while running an email campaign. You’ll need to create graphics and copy for the email, a catchy headline, research the right tools, and even set-up a mailing schedule.

You’d do all of these tasks very differently based on the audience you target. So naturally, you’ll want to start with a target audience.

Make sure you detail things like:

• General demographics 

• Interests and aspirations

• Pain points

• Professional career

• Life outlook

To find these things out, you can make educated guesses about, create a form and send it to some clients, or even hire a survey company.

Don’t worry if you can’t set every detail in stone when you’re starting out. You can fill in the blanks once you have a bigger audience.

Besides a target audience, you should also establish some goals for your email marketing campaigns. 

Are they meant to net new customers?

Warm leads for a launch?

Engage your community?

All of the above?

It’s important to settle on what you expect from email marketing. Once that’s clear, you should also find metrics to see if you stick to your goals.

Acquiring A Toolset

To pull off email marketing, you need the right tools for the job. If you’re bootstrapping, you can make due with a cheap email marketing software. Other similar tools include:

• Sendinblue

• MailChimp

• MailJet

• SendPulse

• Omnisend

Any app from his array will help you centralize mailing lists, segment them, and even send emails in bulk. Most of these also provide analytics for your email campaigns, so one of these tools is indispensable for email marketing efforts.

That’s all you need if you’re on a budget. All the other elements can be taken care of in-house if you know development, or with tools like a page builder or Wordpress.

If you want more, you should also consider something to create “entry points”. On-site elements that people can sign-up with.

For example, you can get OptinMonster to create pop-ups. You can then use these conversion-optimized pop-ups to convince people to sign-up to your email list, or offer free resources in exchange for personal data.

Oh and, don’t forget to also use Google Analytics to help you measure the success of your campaigns. With Analytics, you can get insights into how people choose to sign-up to your list (by setting that up as a conversion goal) and see how much of your traffic comes from email.

If your entire marketing toolset is behind, don’t worry. Our roundup of the best online marketing tools has you covered.

Create A Sign-up Form

The next step in managing email campaigns like a pro is to have a strong sign-up form. This can be a simple Wordpress-generated form, a complex form made with third-party tools, or even a pop-up.

The form doesn’t matter as much.

What matters is that you make it easy to fill. 

Imagine your average audience member just browsing your site, slightly interested in what you have to say. 

They might already be skeptical about sharing their private information with you. Add to that clunky navigation, and a really long form, and you can lose a lot of people through the cracks.

So aim to simplify this step in the funnel as much as you can. Only ask for crucial information.

If you want to segment your audience for email campaigns, you can ask for more information in a smarter way. For example, you can create a pop-up question with multiple answers. 

Let’s say you have a site about financial advice. You can ask people multiple-answer questions like:

“What’s your understanding of personal finance?”

“What percent do you save from your monthly income?”

And then provide several options for each question.

This will let you gain more information about your mailing list members in a non-committed way. Moreover, it triggers a sunk cost fallacy in the minds of your audience members. They’ve already started filling out a questionnaire, so they might as well share their email address too.

It’s a good way to manage your email campaigns like a pro. 

But it does take a bit more work to create.

Regardless of how you choose to build a sign-up form, don’t lose sight of the law. It’s important that you have an up to date Privacy Policy, and that your audience members provide clear consent for data processing specific to email marketing. 

Ready To Send Some Emails?

Marketing emails are not rocket science. If you’ve written any form of copy at some point in your life, you’re prepared to tackle marketing emails.

So that’s a good starting point. A marketing email is a piece of copy, meant to entice, engage, and convince people. So for all emails you send, aim to write flawless copy. The most important part of which is, of course, the subject.

Here’s another exercise. Open your inbox. You likely have dozens of different titles and senders, all wanting something different. 

That’s the same thing your audience members see.

So if you take anything away from this section, it’s to focus on your headlines the most. They need to be perfect if you want to manage your email campaigns like a pro.

Other than that, here are some actionable tips for sending emails:

• Segment your email lists. If you have a site about home decoration, you can segment your lists into “DIY decoration”, “art deco”, or “home renovation”. Segmentation will help you provide valuable information to your audience, improving your conversion rate.

• Adapt your messaging to your brand. The colors, visuals, font, and style of your emails should match your other messaging.

• Use templates. A lot of email marketing tools have templates that help you create emails easier.

• Automate tedious tasks. Things like entering new leads in your lists can be automated, which help you save time in your marketing efforts.

Don’t Forget To Track Everything!

Pros don’t just launch an email campaign and forget about it. Email marketing tools measure things like:

• Email delivery

• Email open rate

• CTR for email CTAs

All of which will provide valuable insights into how good your email campaigns are. Combine that with valuable data from Google Analytics, and you’ll have everything you need to track your campaigns, and optimize them like a pro.