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If you’re a small to medium business owner, free time is not a luxury you can enjoy often. When every minute matters, wasting time creating an email that doesn’t help your business can hold you back. With over 269 Billion emails sent daily, there’s a lot of competition for your audience’s attention.

One of the main advantages of email marketing is that people still widely use email, in fact, 90% of adults and 74% of teenagers regularly use email.

Here are four important things to consider when planning an email marketing campaign.

Audience

The first step to any successful marketing campaign is to know who you are targeting. Who is the intended receiver of your message?

To make your content relevant, you need to identify your target audience and understand their needs. Doing so, will allow you to design a creative email that will engage and encourage them to respond or take an action.

It may be that you identify more than one group you want to target with your email and they may have different requirements. If this is the case, it’s essential that you don’t try to communicate to both groups with the same email and content.

Segment your customer list and if possible develop specific offers for each of the groups. The better your targeting the more likely your campaign will be a success – 80% of an emails success is down to delivering the right content.

Catchy Subject Line

Getting people to open your email is obviously key and an eye-catching email starts with the subject line. The subject line is usually the first thing recipients will see. Try and avoid making it too sales-y, people tend to delete emails that feel like they’re being forced into buying! Punctuation is key here too, avoid using exclamation marks and CAPITAL LETTERS!

One key thing to remember here is that you don’t have a lot of words to make an impression, either; research data shows that most subject lines range from 41 to 50 characters. Even less of your subject line shows on mobile screens, so it’s wise to put the most important parts at the start.

Call to Action (CTA)

When creating an email campaign you need to think of what the objective is, What do you want your target customers to do next? Do you want them to sign up to a newsletter? Are you offering customers a free trial? Are you offering a discount on their next purchase?

Your call to action should not be more than two sentences, and it should be very clear what the next step is. In most cases, a CTA should be positioned near the end of an email. It’s therefore important not to overload the rest of your email with content.

Measure Results

It’s crucial that you review the performance of your email campaigns for the future success of your email marketing campaigns. Most email marketing software includes some sort of built-in performance reports. You can always complement this data with your Google Analytics reports for a better analysis.

Here are some of the most important metrics you should be looking at when reviewing the performance of your email campaigns:

  • Bounces: This refers to the number of email addresses in your subscriber list that didn’t receive your message because it was returned by a recipient mail server.
  • Open rate: This looks at how many of the total number of emails you have sent, have been opened by the recipient. This metric is a great indicator of how well your subject line is working
  • Clicks: This relates to the number of people who have clicked a link in the email content. The higher the number of recipients clicking through, the more relevant and meaningful your content is.

Summary

Keep these things in mind when you create and send your email campaigns. While they won’t necessarily guarantee that your campaign will be a 100% smashing success, they’ll certainly improve your open rates.