How to succeed in your email campaign?

As part of the projects we develop, questions about email routines and email marketing often arise. Whether you want to inform, build loyalty, prospect, or generate interaction with your audience, email marketing remains an essential communication channel. In 2022, what are the elements that make this tool impactful and relevant in your communication strategy?

Your contact list

What would a mailing be without a target audience to send it to?!

Over time, you have managed to build a database filled with interested and consenting contacts in line with GDPR.

Beyond the mandatory aspect of GDPR, having a database of engaged contacts guarantees a lower unsubscribe rate, a higher open rate, and a better click-through rate.

This contact list has been formed through various channels and marketing/communication actions: a newsletter sign-up form on your website, a contest action with a partner company, quote requests, contacts made at a trade show, etc.

Some email marketing solutions even offer their own forms to integrate into your digital channels, directly linked to your contact list.

GDPR info: Before, it didn’t matter much where your contacts came from or if they had given their consent to be on your list. Today, every person in your database must have given explicit consent beforehand. You know, that little checkbox that authorizes the company to send you promotional emails? Yes, that’s it, the opt-in! And be sure to keep the consent register handy; you must be able to prove their engagement at any time.

What does your contact list contain?

Basically, the only mandatory data you need to have is an email address… But that’s a bit too minimalist if you want to reach your audience.

The more data you have, the more opportunities you have to reach your audience through various targeted campaigns with specific objectives. Indeed, you can create as many variables as you want for a contact: Name, first name, language, country, gender, source of the contact, etc.

Targeting strategy

First, centralize!

All these variables mentioned earlier will help you refine your targeting strategy.

The first thing to think about upfront is to centralize everything. Group all the contacts gathered during your actions into your tool.

Segment the contacts

Segmenting your contacts will allow you to offer targeted and relevant content to your audience. Conversely, if you offer them content that doesn’t match their interests, they will eventually lose interest in you!

There are several ways to segment, depending on your internal organization, your audience, and your objectives.

You can create multiple lists to categorize your contacts based on the type of emails they want to receive, for example, or where they came from. You can, of course, have a contact in multiple lists.

Another strategy, which we believe is the best, is to create a single “Master” list, from which you create segments.

You can then segment your contacts based on their language, city, age, or any other variable created earlier for each contact.

It is possible to go even further with “marketing automation,” which allows you to automate segmentation based on your audience’s behavior. For example, if a person has performed certain actions, you assign them a score, and you can then classify them in a list of “engaged leads” to send a specific campaign.

Email creation

Structure and design

Here too, there are several ways to create your email template.

You can do it in-house if you have the necessary resources. Many email marketing solutions offer a wysiwyg editor where you just drag and drop text and image blocks and fill in the fields until you get the desired result.

You can also entrust this task to your digital production agency. We can create a unique template for your campaign based on your graphic charter and content. We can also create a reusable template for you, which will always retain the same base, but where you can add different content blocks.

Whichever solution you choose for creating your template, make sure your email is responsive, meaning it displays correctly on all types of screens (mobile, tablet, etc.).

Writing content

As mentioned, the promotional email is an essential communication channel. Therefore, you are certainly not the only one sending email campaigns. You will need to stand out to capture your audience’s attention.

Here are some tips to take your campaigns to the next level:

Respect your graphic charter

As with your other communication materials, use your graphic charter in the design of your template, both in terms of colors, typography (when possible, always with another fallback font for email clients that cannot interpret it, particularly Outlook), the presence of your logo, links to your social networks, etc.

Write quality and targeted content

Think about your audience and offer them content that matches their expectations and interests. Address them according to the objective of your campaign: do you want to inform them or build loyalty?

Create interaction

Create interaction through engaging visuals, via CTAs (Call to Action) in the form of links or buttons that lead them to your website, an article, a form, a contest, etc.

Address your prospects directly

Use personalized variables: Address your audience with personal data collected in compliance with GDPR (language, name, first name, gender, etc.).

Identify yourself!

Use your company’s name as the sender and an email address with your domain name’s extension. Beforehand, authenticate your main domain through SPF and DKIM records at your DNS zone level.

Make your email subject line impactful

This is the “title” of the mailing, which is displayed even before the user has opened the email. This line must make them want to open the email!

Don’t give it too serious a tone, but not too quirky either (you can even use emojis if appropriate). No false promises, no spam words (“Free!!!!”). And it’s obvious that this label should reflect the content of your email.

Don’t forget the unsubscribe link

It is mandatory. There’s no point in keeping contacts in your audience who are no longer interested in your company and thus no longer engaged. If you are marked as spam too often, you run the risk of being blacklisted by your sending solution.

Beware of “spam words”!

When an email arrives in your inbox, it is scanned by your email solution. If a spam word is detected, your email will be placed in the spam folder and not in the main inbox.

When should I send my email?

If you are new to sending campaigns, it’s best to test several times until you find the moment when the open rate is highest.

Indeed, depending on your field of activity, the best day and time with the highest open rate can vary greatly.

Across all sectors, the best days to send emails are Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday, around 10 a.m. or 2 p.m.

You can send your mailing manually spontaneously when you decide, but you can also schedule the send in your tool so that your campaigns go out at the right time. This is handy if you prepare your campaign in advance and don’t want to send it until the following week… No risk of forgetting!

Be aware of the repercussions!

Great, your email has been sent to your database of 300,000 people, with CTAs all directing to your website.

Have you considered the traffic surge that will be generated on your website? It’s great to have 300,000 visitors who can potentially respond to your email campaign. But can your website handle that much traffic at the same time?

If not, consider splitting your campaigns further.

Do you have a campaign available in 3 languages? Send them at different times! For example, the FR in the morning, the NL late in the morning, and the EN in the afternoon.

But what if my contact list has 200,000 people in just FR? Try to split it based on another variable.

As a last resort, consider increasing your server capacity so that they can handle the traffic load associated with the send.

Analyze your results

After each send, analyze the results of your campaign: the open rate, the click-through rate, the unsubscribe rate, etc.

Compare with other campaigns; this will allow you to identify what works well or, conversely, what doesn’t work at all.

After a campaign, don’t forget to clean up your contact list. Remove non-existent or inactive email addresses.

Continuing to send emails to a contact who is no longer interested can be detrimental.

Which platform should you choose for your email campaigns?

There are quite a few tools on the market that allow you to manage your email campaigns. For example, we can mention Mailjet, Active Campaign, Sendinblue, Mailchimp.

We won’t go into the details of each solution here. Some tools are more basic, others more advanced with features like sending marketing SMS.

At MV Studio, we perfectly adapt to our clients’ constraints and tools. We regularly create reusable templates and implement marketing automation via tools like Mailjet, Mailchimp, or others.

Need help designing and implementing your future campaigns? Or in Marketing Automation? Don’t hesitate to contact us.