What is Email Campaign Management? Best Practices and Examples
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 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, best practices, methods, and inspiring examples all contribute to this. Let’s get started right away!
Table of Contents
- Who Handles Email Marketing Campaign Management?
- What is Email Campaign Management?
- What Makes Email Management Successful?
- Getting Started With Email Campaign Management
- Email Campaign Management – Best Practices
- 5 Ways to Measure the Success of Your Email Campaigns
- Email Marketing Campaigns – Examples We Like
- An Effective Way To Get More Leads For Your Business
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 manager.
The email campaign manager is responsible for the strategy and execution of an email campaign. They ensure email campaign quality — track metrics to improve conversions, optimize deliverability, and create and manage reports for consistent campaign results.
While many businesses argue about the importance of an email manager, 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 email campaign management and its components.
What is Email Campaign Management?
It’s the process of planning, building, and analyzing email campaigns to achieve your business goals. Email campaigns let you send targeted emails to your audience to build customer loyalty and get subscribers to convert. 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 | 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, email campaign management is more of an automated approach with systematic results — designed to align with specific audiences’ interests and behavior. 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 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 demographics, behavior, age, and other factors. 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. 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 campaign templates to create a consistent feel.
- Automation: 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 retarget 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 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.
Getting Started With Email Campaign Management
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:
- Building email lists: Your email lists 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.
- 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 your lists — gathering 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Compliance and legal consideration: 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, they handle 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.
- Planning: Planning a successful email campaign requires you to prepare a calendar with the dates and times you want 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 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 engagement, and increase revenue. Aside from that, you need to implement these best practices to make the most of your email campaign management.
Email Campaign Management – Best Practices
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: Personalization is a powerful way to engage subscribers because they’re less likely to feel spammed when you include their details like names, product preferences, and other activities.
- Use compelling subject lines: 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 more than wanting them to merely open your emails without taking action. Use a simple and clear CTA positioned at the right place to grab their attention. Include a persuasive tone around their interests to convince them to take action. Your CTAs can differ across email campaigns: signing up for a newsletter, downloading a gift, filling out a website form, or purchasing products. 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. 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 surveys and collect feedback to know their preferences. Then use this data to refine your email strategies and adjust your email KPIs.
- Utilize Integration: Integrate your email marketing with other marketing channels to create a unified customer experience. For example, align your email marketing goals with social media marketing or advertising.
- Launch a re-engagement campaign: You can send targeted messages to recipients who haven’t engaged in a long time. But before that, ensure you’ve removed unengaged subscribers to reduce the wastage of resources. Use your 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 audiences’ 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 campaigns could be confined by budgets, 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 audiences are visiting your site but leave 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 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. Now, let’s look at examples to help you get inspired and improve your email performance.
Email Marketing Campaigns – Examples We Like
A common question among email marketers is — how to structure 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 campaigns to improve their email performance.
1. Raising Rates: Newsletter
With percentages and stats, you can show your users how your newsletter content helps them enrich their lifestyles. That’s why the newsletter below is effective in driving 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
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 to understand customer interests and loyalty.
4. Nice Work, Judy – Retention emails
Retention 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 tone and a CTA to bring back the customer.
For any of these examples to work, you need leads in the first place. Let’s see how to get them.
An Effective Way To Get More Leads For Your Business
To effectively manage your email campaigns, you need clean email lists, high deliverability rates, and good engagement. Make these aspects work together with Campaign Refinery’s sleek software — with varied template builders, clean list maintenance, high deliverability rates, and sustained support.
Our user-friendly dashboard will let you monitor your email metrics and be more in control of your email campaigns, as we maintain email best practices for you, and 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!
