Email marketing done right: 7 tips for designing campaigns that drive results

Email marketing is an efficient strategy for businesses to generate traction and engage the intended audience.

You can effectively reach potential customers and retain existing ones through smartly designed email marketing campaigns.

Companies worldwide use email marketing because it has the potential to help you score conversions without having to break the bank.

A well-planned email marketing campaign can lead to an ROI of up to 4400%. However, designing an email campaign that delivers promising results may be more challenging than it sounds. This is why the average open rate of a standard email marketing campaign is less than 2%.

This article showcases a few valuable recommendations that help you design email campaigns that drive awesome results.

So, without further ado, let's get started.

1. Create an Email List the Right Way

A common mistake many businesses make is purchasing contacts to grow their email list rather than doing it correctly.

The size of your email list often dictates the performance of your email marketing campaigns. The larger the list, the greater the chance you will acknowledge a higher open rate.

However, buying email contacts isn't the right thing to do. The first problem you will run into is the relevance. Likely, the contacts purchased may not represent the audience segment you want to target. Plus, by doing so, you may end up violating GDPR guidelines.

You can quickly grow your email list by engaging visitors on your website and offering them something in exchange for sharing the required information with you.

Using gated content may work wonders for you, as you offer useful information and digital assets like e-books, webinars, videos, guides, white papers, and more in exchange for the visitors' contact information.

2. Declutter Your Email List

Even when you've accumulated email contacts the right way, your list may require a clean-up from time to time.

People may not opt out of receiving emails from you. But that doesn't ensure that they'd open your emails.

Having a large email list and sending your messages to all may sound tempting. But it's wise to remove inactive recipients from your list when sending your messages.

It may sound counterintuitive, but sending emails to recipients who are not engaged may affect your campaign's performance and critically affect its open rate.

It may give you misleading insights, which may affect the campaign optimization process later down the road. So, it's best to declutter your email list and remove inactive recipients before sending your messages.

3. Keep Scrolling to a Bare Minimum

When sending emails to your recipients, it's best to keep your message and call-to-action above the fold. Not everyone will read an entire email you send. So, keeping your core message and CTA above the fold increases your chances of engaging the intended audience.

Whether the goal of your campaign is to generate awareness or fuel your conversions, sending lengthy emails can be a turn-off and negatively affect your campaign's performance.

However, the implications of this may vary from one scenario to another. You can do an A/B test to figure out what works best for you.

4. Use Attention-Grabbing Subject Lines

Using catchy subject lines is a smart strategy that can help you boost your email campaign's performance. It's the first thing your recipients notice when they receive your emails. So, try grabbing their attention by coming up with the unique ones.

Your recipients may receive countless emails from brands representing different industries. Your subject lines can make your messages stand out and ensure effective communication.

Around 47% of people open emails based on their subject lines. Creating well-thought-out subject lines may be your best bet to engaging the intended audience.

5. Send Personalized Messages

A common mistake many businesses make when designing email marketing campaigns is that they send generic or bland messages.

You can't just create an email template, send it to your entire list, and expect things to work. Your recipients are highly unlikely to be engaged by emails that seem like they were composed by a bot.

However, it doesn't mean that you should disregard email automation altogether. There's nothing wrong with using email templates as long as you personalize your messages.

6. Focus on Email Deliverability

The first obstacle you face when sending emails to your recipients is surviving the spam filters. All leading email services have spam filters that can prevent your emails from appearing in your recipients' inboxes if you're not careful.

Spam filters assess your emails as per a variety of quality standards and label them as junk if they need to be better.

The best way to avoid this is by meeting those standards to ensure email deliverability. There are a variety of factors that may come into play here, such as the brand's reputation, email copy, email frequency representing the sender, personalization, and more.

It's all about ensuring the quality of the messages you send and how frequently you send them. So, following the industry's best practices may help.

7. Test Your Emails Before Sending

To improve your campaign's performance, you should test your emails before sending them to recipients. For this, you send your team a copy of an email and ask them for their feedback.

Ask them about their first impression when they saw your email in the inbox. Assess how long it took them to tell the call to action. Inquire if the copy was convincing enough to foster engagement and fuel your sales funnel with more prospects.

Testing your emails before sending them will help you identify the problems and come up with fitting solutions. It will optimize your campaign's performance and help you generate the desired traction.

Final Words

There you have it: the seven tips for building email marketing campaigns that drive optimal results. If you've been looking for ways to engage your recipients and improve the performance of your email marketing campaigns, the recommendations in this article may come in handy.