How do you create an email marketing campaign?

08 February 2012

Email marketing, despite being around since the dawn of the internet, is still a major tool in most e-commerce business’s marketing toolkits. A large list of interested customers, who all came to your website by choice and signed up because they thought you had something good to offer them, can be a fantastic source of continuous and reliable revenue.

Creating an email marketing campaign requires three things: a good offer, good writing, and a good plan to get people clicking. It also obviously requires a large list of people who have signed up to a newsletter. A “campaign” includes all of the emails you will send in a specific order to new customers, or to your existing list. Let’s go through these three things.

You can of course set up your own campaign and do all of the mail merges, etc., yourself, but it’s much easier to use a service like aWeber, which does it all for you for only a few dollars a month.

A Good Offer

If you just send an email about your products, most people won’t read it, and some will unsubscribe. You have to make people who went to the trouble to sign up to your list feel like they’re getting something everyone else isn’t. It could be a discount, coupon codes for other products, or a free piece of content or a video that you don’t give away for free.

Note: just because something is exclusive, doesn’t mean it’s valuable. If your email recipients don’t feel like your “bonus content” is worth anything, they’ll get annoyed.

Good Writing

If you don’t know how to write a sales letter, you’ll either have to learn how to do it or pay someone to do it for you. Writers are cheap on the internet, but ones who know how to write good sales emails are one in a million. Read some articles and find some templates for sales letters to see what kind of thing works.

A good tip is to sign up to big retailers, especially fashion - these companies have getting clickthroughs from emails down to a science, and make millions from their email lists alone. You’ll notice that their emails are very low on words. They use an attention-grabbing headline, and products they know people like with big “SALE” signs all over them. And they really work.

A Plan

Your campaign will differ depending on what industry you’re in and what you’re trying to sell. If you’re a retail store, your campaign will be all about giving people regular updates on specials, and will have to evolve over time. If you’re selling a single large product, as many people are, or trying to get people to buy affiliate products, you’ll need a campaign that educates and convinces. If you have five emails, here’s a good sample outline:

1. An introduction, and the bonus content/coupon you promised them
2. A follow up a few days later, explaining your product in more detail
3. A “how-to” that explains how to do something complex, and then shows how much simpler it would be if they bought your product
4. An extra discount. Be careful doing this though, as you risk annoying your early adopters. Give them a treat too.
5. An extra feature or bonus content if they order now.

Obviously this is just a guide and will vary depending on what you’re selling, but it should give you an idea of what format to follow.