How to structure your email marketing campaigns

Boost success – structure your email marketing campaigns

In our last blog we suggested some ideas about creating your own marketing events. But once you’ve created that event, how do you actually structure your email campaign?

That’s the focus of this post. Listing out the key areas you should consider when planning your email marketing campaigns.

It’s not just about maximising key calendar events such as Black Friday or Christmas. Whatever the theme of your campaign it’s important to make sure you’ve got everything planned out.

Making sure your audience is segmented and you’ve got a solid plan on how you’ll maximise the opportunities this time of the year brings.

With most ‘calendar’ based marketing it’s unlikely you’ll be the only business running a Black Friday marketing campaign. So you need to stand out, so let’s make sure you’ve got all the stages covered.

Structure your email marketing campaigns to build awareness

Building awareness is a key part of what you do. You are always building awareness for your products or services.

But sometimes you want to build awareness in relation to a specific event and your participation in it.

Your existing audience

So let’s take Black Friday. Are you going to be doing the same offers across the board or are you doing something different for specific sections of your audience. At the stage, plan out which segments of your audience need to know what.

New subscribers

If you have a key event such as a Black Friday, then you can also use awareness stage to encourage people to sign-up to your email database.

Think about how you could use this message across your website and other key touch points and other channels you use across your business (not everything is online you know).

Structure your email marketing campaigns to create Anticipation

Are you planning just to drop your message out of the blue at the time of the campaign or do you want to nurture a build up to the ‘big’ event.

How you use anticipation depends on the marketing event you are planning. They use best on time sensitive ‘events’.

For a Black Friday campaign or a product launch you might want to tease some potential offers. Providing just enough information to spike your subscribers’ curiosity.

If you need an anticipation stage, could you create impactful messaging that will build excitement and intrigue your email audience. That can be tricky so when planning the ‘anticipation’ step I always like to look at the techniques the entertainment sector use, an album launch, the release of a new blockbuster film or tour ticket releases (such as Glitterbox below, using a gif to highlight three key dates in a single email message).

But remember your plans need to reflect your brand. Add your own unique approach and add value. Make sure the messages are relevant and don’t overwhelm your audience.

Take a balanced approach, and plan out your copy.  It’s also always a good idea to review the outcomes from previous campaigns. Make sure you don’t repeat mistakes but do repeat what works.

Use these insights to set up a series of emails to drip feed key information on particular dates and build up the anticipation.

304 Clothing did an amazing job on this and owned Black Friday weekend with their “The Black Out” campaign. Building intrigue and then standing apart from the ‘normal’ deals with limited edition products and adding their own unique approach to the Black Friday / Cyber Monday traffic.

Structure your email marketing campaign to maximise conversions

Converting interest into action is the aim of this email marketing game. Structure your email marketing campaign, learn from your past performance and you’ll boost your engagement.

If you’ve followed the stages so far, you’ll have planned out a campaign to build interest from your existing audience. And you’ll have also made you to capture interest from your website and the other marketing channels you use to interact with your audience.

Those activities will have resulted in two highly engaged segments with a high buying intent. That’s an audience ready and waiting for the big day, and a segment is likely to drive a lot of sales.

But don’t forget about your behavioural segments. Use your Black Friday campaigns to push offers based on their lifetime value or product recommendations based on previous purchases.

I always like to recommend a VIP first look at Black Friday deals. That approach gives a benefit to those people who’ve spend the most money with you, gives them a sense of exclusivity and gives them a nice little bonus.

Structure your email marketing campaigns to sustain momentum

This stage is all about the longevity of your campaigns. It will be dictated by a number of things including; the success of your email marketing campaigns to date, the nature of your business, and your strategic goals. Consider all of the above when you structure your email marketing campaigns.

For example, it may be an idea to continue an extending a Black Friday sale exclusively for subscribers who didn’t purchase during the promotional period?  Such as this extension message from the Botanist.

This post has focused on event based campaigns.  Be that Valentines, Mothers Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday or even Halloween.

These are all ‘recognised’ calendar events, with two things in common, 1) your participation is probably expected and 2) these calendar events all were created by Marketers!

On these big calendar events, such as standing out can be incredibly difficult.  So why not consider creating your own unique marketing events. Designing unique marketing programmes based on the behaviour of your audience. Create something really special.

Structure your email marketing campaigns, and plan for success.

The key to success in marketing is planning and in this post we’ve suggested four stages to consider when planning out how you structure your email marketing campaigns.

• Building Awareness
• Creating Anticipation
• Maximising Conversions
• Sustaining momentum

This approach will help you focus on the detail and make sure you’ve covered all the elements. Breaking down the stages will help you create relevant and engaging offers, that feed into the bigger marketing plan, and gives you the ability to react when necessary to real-time results.

It’s worth noting that this approach works when creating email marketing programmes as well as campaigns. The main difference being the ‘event’ is driven by the behaviour of your audience. So relevance of the message to those people is hyper-targeted and the results are amazing.

That’s all for now.  However…

If you want to talk to someone about this post or get some help about getting the best results from your email marketing, book some time on our calendar and let’s arrange a chat.  We are standing by to help you create a killer marketing strategy and help your email marketing ‘live its best life’.