What is Email Campaign Management? 7 Best Practices
Email campaigns are potent tools to engage subscribers and add value for existing customers. Although launching an email campaign sounds easy, you must know your audience well to create compelling offers. And the best way to do that is through email campaign management.
Email campaign creation and management revolves around the best practices and strategies to keep your customers engaged and generate the best results. But not every email campaign is created equal, and that’s why you need to follow a proven campaign management process.
Understanding the process of email campaign creation and management, methods, and inspiring examples all contribute to this. Let’s get started with the right ways of managing email campaigns!
Who Handles Email Marketing Campaign Management?
Email marketing is often associated with Email marketers. However, many people are engaged in the success of an email campaign, such as the email campaign managers.
The best email campaign managers understand their responsibility for the strategy and execution of an email campaign. They ensure campaign quality and manage email campaigns, track email campaign metrics to improve conversions, optimize email deliverability, and create and manage reports for consistent campaign results.
Email Campaign Management Services: What Do They Entail?
Email campaign management services often are provided by marketing agencies to help senders analyze their email marketing efforts.
These services include:
- Strategy and planning,
- List management and segmentation,
- Email design and content creation,
- Campaign execution and deployment,
- Performance monitoring and analysis,
- Email platform management and integration.
While many businesses argue about the importance of a campaign manager for email marketing, the role is critical to reach the right target audience at the right time. To get an idea of what to expect during this process, let’s clarify what email campaign management and its components are.
What is Campaign Email Management?
E-mail campaign management is the process of planning, building, and analyzing different types of email campaigns to achieve your business goals. Email campaigns let you send targeted emails to your audience to build customer loyalty and get email subscribers to convert.
But to manage email campaigns, you need a fair idea of the differences between marketing and management.
People often use the terms “email campaign management” and “email marketing” interchangeably, but that is not entirely correct, although the two are closely related. Here’s why:
| Aspect | Email Marketing Management | Email Campaign Management |
|---|---|---|
| Definition | The broader practice of using emails to communicate with the audience, including one-time or ongoing email series. | A planned and strategic email series sent to specific audience segments to achieve a particular goal. |
| Scope | Includes various email activities such as newsletters, transactional emails, and automated email workflows. | Typically involves a sequence of emails with a single objective such as promoting a product or nurturing leads. |
| Goals and objectives | Goals can vary — relationship building, brand awareness, delivering updates through transactional emails. | Specific and measurable goals such as increasing conversions, sales, or driving engagement. |
| Audience segmentation | Involves audience segmentation but not extensive for general email marketing. | Often involve segmentation based demographics, interests, past purchase history. |
While both track results, managing email marketing lists and campaigns is more of an automated approach with systematic results — designed to align with specific audiences’ interests and behavior.
Best Email Campaign Software
We’ve listed the email campaign management tools to guide your email marketing in the right path:
- Campaign Refinery: A versatile email service provider with the highest email deliverability rates in the industry.
- Mailchimp: A simple and user-friendly email marketing platform with strong integrations.
- Brevo: It offers a comprehensive marketing hub, ideal for small businesses.
- Hubspot: It provides a full marketing hub with varied integration options.
To effectively manage your campaigns, you must know what resonates with your audiences, and there are a few components to consider, as you’ll see below.
What Makes Email Marketing Campaign Management Successful?
Successful email campaigns have clear objectives, as they collect quality data, and maintain consistency.
Include these key email campaign components to make them even better:
- Goal setting: The objectives of your email campaigns determine the type of content, frequency, and campaign results. You should set clear objectives such as nurturing leads, increasing sales, building awareness, or driving traffic to your site.
- Audience segmentation: Your subscribers are more likely to open and read your emails when it’s personalized. You should segment your audience into groups based on demographic segmentation, behavioral segmentation, psychographic segmentation, etc. This will help you deliver targeted and relevant email campaigns to each of your segments.
- Content Creation: The email content must show your brand’s personality and also meet your audience’s expectations, offering the best brand emails. Stories are a powerful way to connect with your audience and make them feel like they are a part of your journey. For example, you can share your personal experiences with your product, or tell creative stories that wrap around your sales messages.
- Design and Templates: The email design must be visually appealing and focus on your campaign goals. If you’re unsure about your designs, you can use customized email campaign templates to create a consistent feel.
- Automation: Marketing automation or scheduled emails allow you to send messages based on a trigger or user behavior. Using automation software allows you to focus on other important tasks while your email marketing campaign gets sent out regularly. You can use it to send welcome emails, trigger emails, and re-engagement emails.
- Testing: The next critical aspect is testing and optimization, followed by measuring results, and fine-tuning the processes. Use A/B testing to determine which type of email subject line, timing, or call-to-action works best for your audience.
Now that you know the key aspects of email marketing campaigns, let’s go through the steps to create one.
Email Campaign Management Strategies
Your goals may differ for each campaign, but it’s essential to tie them to your overall business goals and marketing strategies. Here are 8 steps to start your email campaign management.
1. Building Email Lists
Growing your email lists the right way are the core of your marketing campaigns; they’re a collective of people who’ve shown interest in your business. As you build your list, you’ll want to consider segmenting your audiences for targeted content.
2. List Building Strategies
Email marketing databases degrade every year by 22.5%. The only way to make up for these lost contacts is by regularly acquiring new ones. The most secure strategy is to organically build and manage your lists — gathering valid email addresses from your visitors and building relationships with them. You can do this through: subscription offers on blogs, sign-up links in email signatures, and social media advertising.
3. Maintaining List Quality
Regularly cleaning your email lists to remove inactive subscribers, spam traps, and bad email addresses is the best way to ensure your email deliverability. An effective way to do this is by using the double-opt-in method. After signing up, a subscriber must validate their email address, reducing the danger of false or mistyped email addresses.
4. Choosing the Right Email Marketing Software
If you think building email lists is hard, choosing the right email marketing software is even harder — you need to consider the features, pricing, and integration options. Choosing the right tool will enable you to create exciting campaigns, build clean email lists, and automate your email marketing campaigns. That is exactly what we do at Campaign Refinery; we help you build powerful campaigns with pre-made templates and a campaign library, hundreds of integrations and auto-responders, pristine email lists for high deliverability, and ongoing support.
5. Compliance and Legal Considerations
Compliance refers to permission-based email marketing and adhering to the CAN-SPAM and GDPR laws. Even with consented emails, you must provide the unsubscribe link. When you use an ESP to send emails, it handles the legal compliance for you. For example, Campaign Refinery ensures safety by removing harmful and spammy email addresses from your list, a.k.a our automatic list cleaning feature. In addition, your emails will be signed with DKIM by default, protecting you against spam complaints and keeping your sender reputation intact.
6. Planning
Planning a successful email campaign requires you to prepare an email content calendar with the best time to send emails. As a general rule, you should send emails on the days and times your audience is active and likely to engage. For example, Monday and Tuesday are the best days to send emails, between 9 a.m. and 12 p.m. Users are most active in the mornings, and it’s best to schedule your emails at that time.
7. Short Content
Even your most ardent supporters don’t have all day long to read your emails. Their attention span is low, especially when they are reading on their smartphones. Hence, keep your content short and relevant with easy-to-load images, text, and links. Check and implement email size to adapt to different screen sizes.
8. Communicate Regularly
Based on your segmentation, send emails consistently to your audiences according to their needs. This could mean weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly emails as per your subscribers’ needs.
9. Maintain Cohesion
Email marketing campaigns don’t always stand alone, it’s a part of your other marketing channels like social media, website, and advertisements. Ensure you maintain your brand tone and voice across all these channels.
10. Define Your Metrics
To understand the effectiveness of your email campaigns, analyzing your metrics is crucial. For example, you can focus on your email open rates, click-through rates, and marketing conversions to see how your audiences are responding to your campaigns.
Regular maintenance of your email marketing will help you cultivate higher deliverability rates, improve email engagement, and increase revenue. Aside from that, you need to implement these best practices to make the most of your email campaign management.
Best Practices for Email Marketing Content
To hit your email marketing goals, maintain positive customer relationships, and streamline the management process.
And of course, follow these best practices to win:
- Use Personalisation: Email personalization is a powerful way to engage subscribers because they’re less likely to feel spammed when you include their like names, product preferences, and other activities.
- Use compelling subject lines: Email subject lines let customers decide if they want to open your emails and interact with them. The best subject lines are clear, compelling, and immediately show the email matter. A/B test your subject lines to find out what works best for your audience.
- Include a clear CTA: In your email campaigns, you want to interest and engage your subscribers with CTAs rather than wanting them to merely open your emails without taking action. Include a persuasive tone around their interests to convince them to take action. Here’s an example: ” Subscribe today so you never miss a post”.
- Optimize emails for mobiles: 52% of users said that a bad mobile experience leads them to abandon the site faster. Use mobile email marketing to avoid being one of those sites, ensure your emails load quickly, the elements are accessible from a single space, and the fonts are readable.
- Use feedback and surveys: Encourage subscribers to participate in email surveys and collect feedback to know their preferences. Then use this data to refine your email strategies and adjust your email KPIs.
- Launch a re-engagement campaign: You can send re-engagement emails to build trust and credibility by giving your subscribers what they need.
Occasionally, you might not receive the expected results even after implementing these best practices. It’s possible that you’re not effectively analyzing results to understand your audience’s needs. So, let’s look at different ways to measure the success of your email campaigns.
5 Ways to Measure the Success of Your Email Campaigns
As an email marketer, your email marketing costs can shoot up, and when you don’t get the expected results, it could wear down your ROI. To measure the real value of your campaigns, you need to implement email metrics and secure your ROI by doing the following:
1. Landing Page Bounce Rates
If your email campaigns point towards your landing pages, yet you don’t see results, it could be that your links are broken or you need to improve the content on the page.
Higher bounce rates could mean your audience is visiting your site but leaving without taking action. Use a clear CTA and provide more value in your content to keep your bounce rate under control.
2. Website Traffic
When you link to your websites on your email campaigns, it helps you measure how many people took action or converted through emails. You can add website tracking from your ESP dashboard to get a real-time count of subscribers. Just like how Campaign Refinery allows you to access your results from a single place. It gives you a quick overview of which metrics to improve in your future campaigns.
3. Email List Growth Rate
When your email campaigns are ineffective, you’re bound to lose more subscribers, and this will affect your list growth rate. To balance this ratio, you need to acquire new subscribers and grow your email lists the right way.
4. Forward and Share Rate
When recipients forward or share your emails, it’s a good sign that they find it interesting. Forward rate is helpful to know if your emails are engaging enough for recipients to share them with others.
5. Spam Complaints
Even though recipients willingly receive your emails, they might find your content irrelevant and mark it as spam. Too many spam complaints will lead to lower sender reputation, and in worse cases, blacklisting of your domain.
At Campaign Refinery our ideal target rate is less than 0.05% spam complaints. We achieve this for our clients by regularly cleaning email lists and providing high deliverability rates. User accounts above the threshold (0.1%) are terminated immediately, improving the quality of users on the platform.
In addition to these, measure your ROI, open rates, click-through rates, and conversions to know what’s working best for your email campaigns.
Here’s our recommended reading to scale your email marketing:
Now, let’s look at examples to help you get inspired and improve your email performance.
Best Email Marketing Campaigns – Examples We Like
A common question among email marketers is — how to format an email campaign. To know that, you must first understand the types of emails: transactional emails, newsletters, promotional emails, and retention emails. Let’s see how other brands are using these types of end-to-end email campaigns to improve their email performance and review examples of campaign management.
1. Raising Rates: Newsletter
With percentages and stats, you can show your users how your newsletter content helps them enrich their lifestyles. With a proper newsletter campaign manager, you can drive higher open rates.
2. Email Verification: Transactional Email
These emails typically have higher open rates because they’re sent upon user request or as a response to an action. In this case, the verification email is sent to ensure that the customer has a valid email address. To track your email metrics, transactional emails are a great choice.
3. Sauna House: Promotional Email Best Practices
Promotional emails allow you to know how many people are interested in your product and emails, especially if you’re offering discounts. Sauna House does a good job of using this type of campaign and using proper email marketing execution to understand customer interests and loyalty.
4. Nice Work, Judy – Retention emails
Customer reetention emails are the best way to measure customer loyalty and encourage them to return to your website. In this example, the brand uses an engaging email tone and a CTA to bring back the customer.
For any of these examples to work, you need to find the best emails leads in the first place. Let’s see how to get them.
The Best Email Marketing Campaign Management and Reporting Company
To effectively manage your email campaigns, you need clean email lists, high deliverability rates, good engagement, and an efficient campaign email manager. Make these aspects work together with our sleek software — with varied template builders, clean list maintenance, high deliverability rates, and sustained support.
What’s more, monitor your email metrics and be more in control of your email campaigns with our user-friendly dashboard. We maintain email best practices for you, so you can focus on getting more leads for your business.
And if you ever notice a drop in your leads, use our lead generation strategy — Sign up for the free Lead Generation Multiplier Course and learn the tactics to improve your lead magnet consumption by 8x more clicks!
But even with the best strategies, you might require additional help to boost your email marketing efforts — apply to see if we’re a good fit and make your way to better email marketing results!
FAQ
What is an open source email campaign manager?
An open source email campaign management is when an email marketing platform’s source code is publicly available and can be freely used and modified by anyone.
What are email CRM best practices?
Here’s a list of common email CRM best practices:
- Integrate with other marketing tools,
- Regularly synchronize data between platforms,
- Maintain a clean database,
- Segment your audience,
- Provide value with email campaigns,
- Check and automate the email workflows.
What makes a successful email marketing campaign?
A successful email campaign targets the right customer segment, has a clear subject line, visual appeal, and a compelling CTA. More importantly, it adheres to email marketing regulations.
What about the eblast best practices?
Every e-blast must follow these guidelines:
- Define your goals and purpose,
- Segment your audience,
- Craft an interesting subject line,
- Keep the content scannable,
- Include an unsubscribe link.
