Everyone knows how important email marketing campaigns are for any business. However, the problem is creating a campaign that stands out from the hundreds of emails people receive every day. You don’t want to be wasting your time, effort, and opportunity on creating an email no-one will read.

So how do you create an email that people will engage with?

Well luckily for you, we have 9 easy tips to help you build an effective email marketing campaign.

1.  Choose a relevant email list

You need to make sure you are sending your email to the right people to get maximum impact. You can do this by segmenting your audience, for example, highly relevant audience demographics may be age, gender or perhaps a group of customers who have all purchased a type of product.

2.  Design your email

It’s important you design your email in a way that is user-friendly, as well as aesthetically pleasing and representative of your brand. Brand colours, logos and fonts should be used throughout the email to ensure you stay aligned with visual brand identity. Make sure you include white space and use images to make it more interesting (a header image could be a good idea!). You should also consider device compatibility, ensuring it looks great on both desktop and mobile screens. Also make sure the CTA (call-to-action) is clear, whether that be a button to your website or a link to a video.

3.  Grab their attention with an enticing subject line

You need to convince the subscriber that the email is worth opening. A catchy but straightforward subject line is best. The use of emojis has also been found to increase open rates by 45% (Campaign Monitor), but make sure you don’t over use them. Personalising the subject line with the subscribers’ name can also be an effective method at grabbing their attention.

4.  Offer real value to the reader

Another thing to take into consideration, is to provide real value in the email. This can be through exclusive offers for subscribers, valuable information or offering emotional value such as story telling. Be creative!

5.  Be conversational

The average person gets hundreds of emails a day and are bored of reading sales-y emails. A better technique is to be more friendly and conversational, so that you can build a relationship with them and gain more engagement.

6.  Send emails from a real person

We also recommend sending your business emails from a real person, not a ‘no-reply’ business email address. You don’t want your emails to come across as automatic and generic. This links to the point before - it’s best to be more friendly and human.

7.  Don’t overdo it

This is also really important. Don’t overdo it with the emails! You don’t want your subscribers getting frustrated from receiving too many emails. It’s best to monitor your metrics over time to analyse what your subscriber behaviour is like, so you then know what performs best. We suggest you monitor the click-through rate, conversion rate, bounce rate and overall ROI.

8.  Mix it up

Send a mixture of different types of emails. It’s going to get boring and predictable if you continually send out the same sort of emails time and time again. For example, don’t just send out promotional offer emails every week.  The aim is for the emails to be interactive and engaging, you don’t want the click-through rate to drop because your subscribers are uninterested in your emails.

9.  A/B test your emails

A/B testing allows you to test two different versions of your email by sending one version to one portion of your audience, and the other email to a different portion of your audience. You can then compare to see which email performed better, so you know for the future which type to send out to your whole audience list. You could test things such as email subject lines, email length, layout, videos vs images etc! This helps to improve your email campaigns in the long run.