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Despite an ever-growing surge of social media apps and platforms, email is still a major consistent player in the marketing world. Email marketing allows brands to connect and respond to their target audience, and has the highest return on investment of all online marketing channels. Plus it’s super affordable, which makes it great for small businesses. However, with over 269 billion emails sent each day, there’s a lot of competition out there. If you want to know how to run a successful marketing campaign that will drive engagement and sales, here’s our step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Define your goals

Your goals for your email marketing campaign should line up with the overall objectives of your company. Pinpoint exactly what you want your campaign to achieve, whether it’s welcoming new subscribers or boosting engagement. From there, your goals will give you a good indication of whether you should be sending promotional, relational or transactional emails.

Step 2: Build your email list

If your primary aim is to nurture existing subscribers, then you should already have a bunch of known contacts at your fingertips. However, if you’re starting from scratch you’ll need to build a list of promising email addresses. Google Analytics is a great starting point when it comes to finding valuable leads. Alternately, nonintrusive popups on your site that offer irresistible incentives – like discounts or free shipping on first orders – gain immediate attention, and immediate results.

Step 3: Craft your email

A great email starts with a great subject line. Personalizing your email and creating a hook right at the start will encourage subscribers to read on. When it comes to copy, keep it direct and simple, and break up your text with blank spaces and images so the reader can quickly scan the page.

The end of your email copy will contain your call to action (CTA). This reinforces what you want your subscribers to do. For example, a property management company in Whistler would use their CTA to encourage subscribers to book their winter vacation before a certain date to secure the best deals.

Step 4: Test it out

Your email marketing campaign will need to be constantly evolving to stay ahead of the competition. A/B testing is a great way to see which kind of email designs, subject lines and CTAs perform best. Alongside this, you should also regularly monitor your email list so that you can re-engage inactive subscribers, and remove them if your attempts fail.

Step 5: Be consistent!

Once all of the hard work is done, it’s important to keep at it! If you do choose to manage your email campaigns by hand, we highly recommend you use email templates to save time. Email automation is also a cost-effective option that enables you to enhance the customer experience by responding to customers immediately – at all hours.

If you need any help launching an email marketing campaign, or if you would like detailed tracking and reporting of your marketing efforts, please contact Cloud9! Our experienced team build successful email marketing strategies that cultivate audiences and connect businesses with their growing online communities.