Email Campaigns 101

Regularly sending campaigns your audience is crucial for staying relevant, engaging with potential customers, driving consistent revenue, and maintaining a healthy deliverability. But whether you’re brand new to sending email campaigns, or you’ve been at it for years, you might run into the following common questions:

1. How often should I be emailing my list?
2. How often should I be segmenting my campaigns?
3. What type of content should I be sending?
4. What’s the best template to use?

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Sending Cadence

It’s very important to be cognizant of what your brand’s sending cadence + frequency will be — you don’t want to bother your subscribers, but you also don’t want to fade into the background of peoples’ inboxes.

Here are 3 rules for choosing a sending cadence:

Another important thing to consider: if you’re segmenting your emails, it’s likely that not every single contact is receiving every single email you send. That being said, if you’re being intentional with your messaging, you don’t need to worry about bothering your list with too many emails.

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Sending to All Contacts vs Segments

Let’s face it: not every email that you send is meant for every contact on your list. Every contact is a human being at a different point in their customer journey with you. You’ll have people who just signed up 3 days ago, and people whose last purchase was 1 year ago. If you want your campaigns to be impactful, this is why you need to use segments more often!

There’s no magic formula or ratio for how many emails should be sent to All Contacts vs. Custom Segments, but you should be trying to send to segments as much as you can, especially because segmentation makes content creation easier, because you know exactly who you’re speaking to.

Campaigns that should be sent to All Contacts:

• Big sale announcements (Black Friday, holidays, birthday sales…)

• Major brand updates (rebrands, new initiatives, new products…)

• Newsletter content (recipes, style guides, press…)

Campaigns that should be sent to Segments:

This depends on the segments you use for your business, but here’s some ideas:

• Engaged Contacts / VIP segments:

  VIP early access, sneak peeks, or teaser emails

• Potential Customers:

  limited-time incentives to place their first order

• By Purchase History:

  product spotlights, cross sell content

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Content

Sending engaging, creative content is important when sending campaigns. You want to ensure that you have a good balance between “sale” content and delivering value to your subscribers in other ways so that you don’t over-discount your brand, or take away from deals being time-sensitive or intentional — essentially, if your brand is always on sale, then what’s the motivation to buy now vs. 5 weeks from now?

Here are some content ideas that deliver value outside of sales:

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Templates

Whether you’re a graphic designer or a marketing novice, choosing and creating an email template can be challenging. With email marketing, you have to consider not only the appearance, but also your deliverability and engagement.

There’s no single layout, color scheme or font that works better than all the others, but here’s a few things that every template should have: