What is an email campaign?

As a marketer, running an email campaign can help you reach and connect with your audience. This allows you to share news about your company, promote new products or services, and drive traffic, conversions, and revenue.

But running a successful email marketing campaign requires you to distinguish your message from that of your competitors—including other email marketers.

To accomplish this, you should follow and employ these email campaign best practices while complementing them with tips from our email deliverability handbook.

Want to jump ahead? What is an email campaign? Best practices for a successful email campaign Use an email marketing campaign platform Comply with privacy laws and regulations Use permission-based email marketing strategies Prioritize email hygiene Segment your subscriber list and personalize your email campaigns Conclusion

What is an email campaign?

An email campaign is a marketing strategy in which you plan and send out a coordinated sequence of emails to a specific list of recipients for a single purpose.

Effective email marketing campaigns nurture and convert leads, engage with your audience, and establish and grow brand awareness. Successful email campaigns can also generate useful information about your recipients that you can use to enhance your email marketing strategy and increase awareness, conversions, and revenue.

Best practices for a successful email campaign

Email campaigns entail more than just sending out emails to your list of subscribers. Email campaigns can be an effective part of your marketing efforts, but require time and planning to be the most effective.

When crafting your email campaign, adhere to these best practices to improve your ROI and connect with your subscribers.

Use an email marketing campaign platform

Email service providers alone, like Gmail or Outlook, aren’t sufficient for running an email campaign. An email service provider lacks many of the tools marketers need to run a successful email campaign, assess the effectiveness of a marketing campaign, and follow best practices for achieving the desired KPIs of an email marketing strategy.

Email marketing campaign platforms, like Ongage, are designed with marketers in mind. Email marketing software lets marketers create highly-tailored and personalized email campaigns, target the right subscribers, gather useful recipient information, and generate reports that analyze reach, conversions, and other important metrics.

In other words, email marketing software lays the foundation on which marketers can build and manage successful email campaigns.

Comply with privacy laws and regulations

Laws and regulations vary depending on where your email subscribers live. Running afoul of these laws and regulations can significantly impact your ability to run a successful email campaign—and can even expose you to fines and other penalties.

Complying with the various laws and regulations that affect email marketing, such as the GDPR and CAN-SPAM Act, can help your emails reach their intended recipients. Though these rules are complex, email campaign marketing platforms help you stay in compliance by ensuring you adhere to best practices for running your email campaigns.

Use permission-based email marketing strategies

Permission email marketing is the practice of asking email subscribers for permission before you add them to your mailing list and begin communicating with them. Permission-based email marketing helps email campaigns succeed by reducing spam complaints and deliverability issues.

You can adopt permission email marketing by:

• Using opt-ins. Opt-ins let potential email subscribers give you permission to contact them, and are often used in conjunction with a lead magnet, such as a discount code or free download. Double opt-ins go even further by sending initial leads an email confirming their subscription to your list, improving your list hygiene and mitigating potential deliverability issues.
• Making it convenient to opt out or unsubscribe. Including an unsubscribe link in each email you send is necessary for complying with email laws and regulations. It’s also a way to show your email subscribers that you value their time. Make it convenient for users to unsubscribe from your emails to prevent spam complaints and low engagement rates.
• Letting email subscribers personalize email frequency. Some users unsubscribe from email campaigns that send out emails too frequently. Others might want to hear from you more often. Provide options that allow your subscribers to personalize the frequency in which they receive your emails to maintain high engagement for your email campaigns.

Prioritize email hygiene

Email hygiene practices keep your subscriber list clean of inactive users, spam traps, and other addresses that can impact the success rate of your email campaigns. These issues can impact your deliverability, increase your bounce rate, and skew the metrics by which you determine if your email marketing campaign is a success.

Proper email hygiene should be an ongoing initiative throughout each of your email campaigns. You can accomplish this by:

• Removing inactive subscribers.
• Using third-party email validation services to determine if email addresses on your list are correct and active.
• Removing repeat soft bounces.
• Making it easy for your email subscribers to unsubscribe.

You should also focus on growing your list organically—and never buying or scraping subscriber lists. Additionally, real-time validation can help you avoid adding invalid email addresses to your list in the first place, helping you start your email campaign off on the right foot.

Segment your subscriber list and personalize your email campaigns

To run an effective email campaign, you need to target the right subscribers. Email list segmentation divides your email subscribers into different groups based on shared characteristics, such as location, demographics, beliefs and values, and behaviors.

Using segmentation can make your email campaigns more relevant to the audience you choose to target. This, in turn, increases ROI and improves your email campaign metrics.

You can also use segmentation data to further personalize your email campaigns. Personalized emails can make subscribers more likely to engage with your brand and take your desired CTA, further compounding your ROI and increasing the success of your marketing efforts.

Conclusion

Effective email marketing campaigns can play a large role in your content marketing strategy. Email campaigns are a way for you to connect with your brand’s audience, generate leads, and drive conversions. But for your marketing efforts to be worth it, you need to adhere to email campaign best practices.

Start by adopting a powerful and versatile email marketing platform like Ongage. This gives you the foundation and support you need to comply with privacy and regulation laws, institute permission-based marketing efforts, maintain clean subscriber lists, and segment and personalize your email campaigns to maximize engagement and ROI.