Do you have an upcoming email marketing campaign that you really need to make a splash? If you’ve tried to attract attention and increase conversions with your campaigns to no avail, this article is for you. We’ll teach you the best practices you need to start implementing to see the results you’ve been hoping for. Read on to discover the 5 steps you can follow to make your next email marketing campaign your most effective to date. 

Step #1: Lay The Foundation for a Strong Campaign

To ensure the best chance of your email marketing campaign succeeding, you’ll need to grow your email subscriber list. After all, there’s no point in creating a stellar campaign if no one is going to receive it. Even if you already have a sizeable subscriber count, it’s vital to get your campaign seen by as many potential leads as possible.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that every company has to start somewhere. That may mean you end up sending your first campaign to only a handful of people. But you can take the lessons learned (and our tips) to ensure your list keeps growing with each campaign.

So how should you best go about growing your subscriber list? Utilize the most powerful tool at your disposal: your website. Your website’s visitors are the easiest individuals to convince to sign up to your email list—provided you take the right approach. 

The easiest and most effective approach is to use a custom email subscriber form on your website. This type of form allows you to customize fields so you can pinpoint the information your subscribers actually want to receive (such as email marketing campaigns) and how often they want to receive it. Giving subscribers the opportunity to communicate this information to you when they subscribe is essential, as it will help you target the right individuals for your campaign.

Pro tip: If you’re looking for other ways to grow your email subscriber list, be sure to check out our 20 tips! 

Step #2: Set Your Campaign’s Goal

The next step is one that is essential but often overlooked: determine the main goal of your email marketing campaign. We know that it can be tempting to rush right into writing the copy for your campaign and sending it out to your subscribers, but without clear objective your campaign will likely be all over the place.

Take the time to think about what exactly you want to achieve from your campaign. Making the effort to do so will ensure that your campaign is targeted and has all the necessary elements to make it a success. To kick off the brainstorming, ask yourself the following questions:

Do you want your email campaign to:

• Encourage subscribers to buy one or more products or services?
• Increase visits to the website or a particular page?
• Get the word out about a product, service, or campaign?
• Boost social media following?
• Highlight a particular blog post?

Step #3: Determine the Type of Campaign 

With the goal of your email marketing campaign in mind, the next step is to determine the type of campaign you want to send your subscribers. Ultimately, you should select the type of campaign that encourages subscribers to take whatever action will enable you to achieve your defined goal. For example, if your goal is to grow your Twitter following, the type of email marketing campaign you choose should be geared toward getting subscribers to follow you on the platform. 

Good news: There are countless types of email campaigns to choose from. Here are some of the most popular campaigns Maropost suggests you consider using:

• Welcome emails
• Promotional 
• Seasonal
• Triggered email series
• Post-purchase drip campaigns
• Connect-via-social
• Newsletters
• Cart abandonment campaigns
• Re-engagement campaigns

Step #4: Perfect the Elements of Your Campaign

Now comes the fun part: piece your campaign together. Don’t worry; you don’t need to be a coding or design wiz to put together an aesthetically-pleasing email campaign. You simply need a little help from a reliable email marketing platform. We recommend MailChimp, which is the platform of choice for roughly 11 million customers and growing. 

One key advantage of this platform is that its drag-and-drop email builder simplifies the whole email campaign creation process while allowing you to fully customize all the design elements of the campaign. Plus, once you have your email subscriber form set up (see Step #2), you can directly integrate your forms with MailChimp using our Gravity Forms MailChimp  Add-on.

Just about the only thing it won’t do is write the copy for you! This is a crucial task you will have to handle by yourself. It’s not as difficult as it seems once you have a few copywriting tips and tricks  up your sleeve.

Step #5: Automate It 

The final key step to creating a killer campaign is to automate the whole process. Instead of manually figuring out which emails to send to your subscribers and when, you should rely on a program to do the hard work for you. 

If you use Gravity Forms and MailChimp as we suggested above, this couldn’t be simpler. All you need to do is connect Gravity Forms with MailChimp. Once you set this up, you can automate your email marketing campaign and even initiate a drip campaign. 

Conclusion

Creating an email marketing campaign doesn’t need to be taxing. There’s no denying that it takes some work, but it is quite a methodical process once you have the know-how to develop one from start to finish. So long as you follow our guide above, you’ll be on your way to launching your most successful email marketing campaign to date in no time.