5 Technical Steps for a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

Email marketing has been an underrated but extremely effective tool in almost every marketer’s arsenal. In fact, a 2019 survey found that 60% of marketers believe email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels in terms of ROI (Return on Investment). There seems to be a good basis for their claims because 59% of consumers in that same survey said emails influence their purchase decisions. In such a scenario, having a strong email marketing strategy is a must.

What’s so important about email marketing?

Email marketing has been around for some time but that doesn’t take anything away from its incredible value as a marketing channel. There are several unique factors about email that make it one of the most important channels out there.

Email marketing often has the best ROI

For every $1 that’s spent on an email campaign, an average of $38 in revenue is generated. That kind of ROI is almost inconceivable for most other marketing channels.

Certain kinds of marketing communications are best suited for email

B2B companies swear by email, particularly newsletters when it comes to marketing communication. In fact, 93% of B2B marketers say that they use email as an important marketing channel.

Email marketing adapts very easily to a mobile-first world

46% of all emails are opened on mobile devices. As the world shifts towards mobile, this becomes a major advantage, and has good chances of increasing. Easy access to email is a part of almost every mobile device, which makes it even more effective as a marketing tool.

5 technical steps that will help your email campaign succeed

Given that email marketing is so popular, you’ll end up facing a lot of competition. In order to run a successful marketing campaign, there are certain technical aspects you need to be aware of. Here are five of the most important ones:

Protect the reputation of your company domain and IP

When you run a marketing campaign via email, there’s always a chance you’ ll run into trouble with email providers’ spam filters. You don’t want your company’s domain name and delivery of your transactional emails to be affected by your marketing campaign. So make sure you use a separate company domain with an email address. You will then need to verify the reputation of this new domain along with the IP of your SMTP server.

Set up your SPF

An SPF (Sender Policy Framework) allows you to choose which IP addresses can send emails from your domain. Once you define these IPs, the email will only be delivered if it comes from one of these IPs. You also need to set up a DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) which will allow you to protect both yourself and the recipient by adding an encryption to sign emails.

Avoid the spam filters

Email providers have spam filters that use semantics to decide whether a particular email belongs to the spam category. There are certain words and phrases that are especially susceptible and you should try your best to avoid them in the body of the email. Examples include excessive capital letters, symbols, unstructured phrases, and punctuation marks. You should also avoid content that is excessively personalized, suggests a discount, creates a sense of urgency, implies a gratuity, and so on.

Segment your contact base

To begin segmenting your contact base, you first need to identify your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). Once you do that, you can start building detailed personas to help you and your team understand your target audience in much more detail. ICP is not just about finding your target customer, but about identifying those customers who would love your product or service to the extent that they could become brand advocates.

Build A/B tests

All good marketers test their marketing copy through precise A/B tests. Split testing allows you to test different versions of your email copy until you finally find the one that is most effective. Systematically A/B testing your way through every small detail of your copy is probably the best way to hit upon that perfect email.

How to tell if your email marketing campaign is successful

Like with any digital marketing effort, your email marketing campaign has to have two things — well-defined goals, and metrics to measure these goals. For instance, if your goal is to build brand awareness, email opens could be a good metric. If, on the other hand, it’s more about building traffic to your website, the CTR (Click Through Rate) would be a better metric.

It’s also important to know what numbers you need for a campaign to qualify as successful. Doing some industry benchmarking is a good idea. Once you have the goals and solid metrics to measure success against, you should be able to easily understand how the campaign is going and where you need improvement.

While email marketing is still one of the most effective marketing channels, marketers today have to contend with excessive competition and hyper-vigilant spam filters. In order to create quality emails that land in the inbox and are actually opened by the reader, you need to start by being mindful of the technicalities. If you want further information on the more technical aspects of email marketing, check out the infographic below.