Campaigns
Email Campaigns 101
Learn industry best practices and find answers to common questions about engaging with your audience.
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:
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.
- How often should I be emailing my list?
- How often should I be segmenting my campaigns?
- What type of content should I be sending?
- What’s the best template to use?
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:Send at least one campaign a month.
Send at least one campaign a month.
A huge reason that businesses send campaigns is to stay relevant and visible. Sending at least one campaign a month lets your subscribers know your business is active and keeps you top of mind. Neglecting to engage with your audience will impact the return you see in email because a subscriber will not purchase from you if they forget you’re around.
Avoid taking large gaps in sending.
Avoid taking large gaps in sending.
Deliverability is another major player in choosing your email cadence. Taking large gaps in sending for months at a time puts your domain at risk for dangerous levels of spam complaints and a diminished track record of engagement once you start sending again; inbox providers may start filtering your emails to spam if they start detecting this.
Choose a sending cadence that you know you can be consistent with.
Choose a sending cadence that you know you can be consistent with.
Don’t bite off more than you can chew! Avoid sending 3x a week if there’s a risk that you won’t have time to keep it up. Choose a cadence that feels realistic to your bandwidth and how your business operates so that you can set proper expectations with your audience.
The most important thing is to be consistent so that your audience knows what to expect from your brand’s marketing.
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…)
- 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
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:Product Spotlights
Product Spotlights
Show off the top 3 highlights about a certain product + show what problems it can solve. This is great for customers who might still be in the “discovery phase” of their journey!
Customer Stories + Reviews
Customer Stories + Reviews
Social proof is so important for building subscribers’ trust and turning them into customers! Feature reviews, before + afters, and how your product has changed someone’s life for the better so people can understand why they need it.
Your products seen in the wild
Your products seen in the wild
Was your brand featured in a publication, on TV, or seen on a celebrity? Did a customer style your product in a cool way? This is a great trend to take advantage of. Show it off to your subscribers so that it sparks inspiration and drives them to buy it while it’s hot.
Recipes or guides
Recipes or guides
Spark inspiration with your subscribers by showing them fun and innovative ways to use your products, what kind of person they’d be best to gift to, or what current trend(s) they fit into. This provides real-world context for people and drives them to purchase.
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:Your logo and brand colors.
Your logo and brand colors.
When your emails are opened, they should be instantly recognizable. Feature your brand’s logo at the very top and use your brand’s colors throughout the content (buttons, text, and footer, etc).
Your emails should look and feel like an extension of your website!
A call-to-action above the fold.
A call-to-action above the fold.
Your recipient shouldn’t need to scroll far to find a button or something clickable in your email. Include a button near the top of the email for anyone ready to click to your site straight away.
Make sure all images, including a header image, are clickable in your email. You want your recipient to be able to click anything that grabs their attention and be brought to your site to take action!
A healthy image to text ratio.
A healthy image to text ratio.
Image-only or image-heavy emails can be flagged by inbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo as a spam practice and might increase your chances of landing in spam. Make sure you integrate text boxes and/or alternate text whenever possible!
There is an email marketing industry standard called the “40/60 ratio”, where a ratio of 40% images to 60% text content is recommended.
Copy that gets straight to the point and drives your recipient to takeaction.
Copy that gets straight to the point and drives your recipient to takeaction.
It’s good to include text in your emails, but don’t overcomplicate it! People can’t buy from you in their inbox, so you want your recipients to get from your email to your website ASAP. Say just enough to entice them to click for more — you’ll see the difference in your click-through rates and orders.