Essential Practices for Email Campaign Management

When deciding to launch an email campaign to inform your clients or subscribers about news or special events, it’s essential to follow best practices. We guide you step by step through the creation of an email campaign, providing you with the essential keys to succeed in your mission.

Define an Email Campaign Objective

Before sending an email to customers, a company must define a clear objective. You can’t send an email without knowing what you’ll share with your customers. You might want to:

• promote a loyalty program;
• share the development of a new product;
• share exclusive information about your company’s behind-the-scenes, etc.

Objectives can vary, but once set, it will be your guiding principle throughout the campaign creation.

When this objective is defined, you need to think about the campaign framework. This framework is like a schedule to follow throughout this strategy. If you decide to create a campaign following the arrival of a new client, you might start, for example, with sending a welcome email. Then, you can send a welcome offer and propose a wishlist.

Targeting Recipients

At the same time, you must not overlook the importance of targeting. The better you target recipients, the more you can create personalized content that will have an impact on readers.

Thus, you start by segmenting the contact list. Sort prospect or customer data by gender, age, professional situation, geographic location, etc. The more information you have about their habits, the more you can create a persona (typical profile) with maximum details.

This practice is essential because, according to some figures, recipients are at least 70% more likely to open an email from a segmented campaign. This step ensures you have the best chance of offering a targeted campaign where readers will be more interested.

Creating Emails

Once your objective and persona are defined, you can start the more creative part of the email campaign. However, just because you need to be creative doesn’t mean there aren’t rules to follow to spark readers’ interest.

Importance of the Subject Line

One of the most crucial practices in emailing is writing the subject line. You know that the subject line is the first thing the recipient sees. Therefore, it must be perfectly written to make them want to open the email, thus increasing your open rate. Offer a readable and engaging subject line. For example, it can be personalized with the recipient’s first name.

Selecting Information to Share

Build the content based on your objective to share useful information. Don’t get sidetracked and stay focused on your goal. Indeed, sharing too much information can lead to reader disengagement. This will be counterproductive for your email campaign.

Working on the Email Template

The layout and design of your emails are essential. You will need to choose a template that is both aesthetic and readable for your subscribers. This template must respect your company’s graphic charter and make readers want to read it.

It is essential to choose the right fonts, colors, and also the placement of texts, images, and links.

The Importance of A/B Testing Before the Final Send

Before officially launching your email campaign, you need to do some tests! A/B testing involves testing several subject lines with a small part of your database.

Specifically, you will send a professional email to a portion of your subscribers, changing the subject line. It’s an effective solution to test the open rate on two or three subject lines. These tests will determine which subject line works best with your recipients. It’s a key step to adjust your campaign with improvements.

You can perform these tests on other elements of the email, such as the illustration image or the placement of a link. Note that you should modify only one element in the entire email to best target the optimal option.

Scheduling Email Sends

You can’t send your emails to your contact list without any thought about the period, frequency, day, and time of sending the email.

It’s essential to think about the best period to launch the campaign. If you want to promote a spring collection, for example, you won’t send these emails in the middle of October.

In the same logic, the company must think about the length of the campaign, and therefore the number of days between each send. Avoid sending too frequently, as you risk ending up in your recipients’ spam.

You need to determine the best day of the week to target your readers. Find out about the habits of people matching your target. Often, Monday and Tuesday are the most favorable days. But if you have already run campaigns before, maybe you have analyzed your readers’ habits? In addition to the day, you also need to determine a time when the open rate will be the highest possible.

Track Statistics to See if the Campaign Delivered on its Promises!

A few days after sending your campaign, it’s time to see if it worked! Thus, among the essential practices, there’s the analysis of KPIs, also called performance indicators.

Several numbers are important:

• open rate;
• click-through rate;
• bounce rate;
• reactivity rate;
• unsubscribe rate, etc.

Our tool allows you to measure email campaign impact in real-time.

Each of these percentages helps you understand what portion of your readers opened the email, clicked on the included link, took action by purchasing, unsubscribed, etc.

These indicators ensure you know your campaign’s performance and especially the areas for improvement in future campaigns.