5 Ideas For Your Next Email Marketing Campaign

Did you know that 91% of consumers check their email daily? Even from the early days of online marketing, email has played a prominent role in allowing businesses to reach their target audience with the click of a button.

In 1978, Gary Thuerk sent out the first mass email to around 400 potential clients. But since then, the technology that is available to marketers has taken a huge step forward. CRM systems with email integrations, such as Hubspot, or exclusive email marketing automation software, such as Mailchimp, allow marketers to deliver highly-targeted content directly to their customers’ inbox.

These new technologies give marketers so much more freedom to create unique marketing campaigns tailored to their specific goals. The ability to segment mailing lists has also allowed marketers to optimise each campaign so that it’s only being sent to the most relevant people. Whether you want to nurture existing leads, welcome new customers or delight current customers, email marketing platforms such as those mentioned above offer all the tools you need to get the job done.

Whilst these technologies can give marketers total creative freedom, actually finding that creative inspiration can be surprisingly difficult at times. With this in mind, here are 5 ideas that you could use for your next email marketing campaign.

Monthly round-up

One of the most popular email marketing campaigns amongst brands is a monthly roundup, otherwise known as the ‘monthly newsletter’.  This is simply a brief round-up of everything that has happened over the last month. Depending on how you want to angle this, the round-up can solely highlight any recent company news, or it could be a more general newsletter that discusses any news from your industry or local area. It’s a great way to stay in touch with your customers and keep them updated with any new product launches, team achievements and general company news. The great thing about this is that once you’ve put together your original template, it doesn’t take very much effort to maintain each month. You could also repurpose this as an internal company newsletter, highlighting some of the more personal company news that maybe wouldn’t be relevant for clients; for example, if someone within your team has just become engaged.

Quick tips

If you don’t have time to put together a monthly round-up email then this could be a better option for you. The email doesn’t need to be anything too fancy, but that doesn’t mean you can’t invest some money into a nice template if you feel it’s necessary. Next, gather three-to-five quick, actionable tips that will offer some real value to your readers without taking up too much of their time.

For example, if you were a digital marketing agency then your first tip could be something like “Did you know that Google recently moved to a mobile-first index? This means that if your website isn’t optimised for mobile, your search rankings will suffer. Check out Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool to see if your site works on mobile.”, with a link to the mobile-friendly test tool. If you have an onsite blog, you could even pull some tips from this. You don’t really need anything more than that; it’s just a great way to stay front-of-mind with your clients and followers, whilst providing some value at the same time.

Follow up emails

If you have access to email marketing automation software such as Hubspot or Mailchimp then this one is definitely for you. Traditionally you may have had to send any follow up emails manually; something that can understandably take up a load of time. But these tools use ‘workflows’ that allow you to craft a process that will automatically send a personalised follow-up email after someone has completed a pre-determined action.

For example, you could set up a workflow that sends out a ‘Welcome’ email whenever someone new signs up for your product or service. Or how about an automated email with some additional free content for any potential clients that have downloaded your latest whitepaper? You could even set up something more simple such as an auto-responder for whenever someone sends an email to your customer service email address. This route can take a while to set up at first, but over the long run it will literally save you hundreds of hours of work.

Blog/content highlights

This is another fairly easy email to set up. All you need to do is create an email template and curate your content. Pull together any high-performing blogs, videos or social media content that you have published over the last month and send it to your mailing list. You can include as many blogs as you wish, but we find that somewhere around five articles tends to work best. For the most effective results use Google Analytics to see which blogs have received the highest number of page views or conversions. From here you can use this to decide how to order the content in your email; always put your top-performing content first.

Promotional offers

Using promotional offers in email marketing can be a great way to drive traffic to a specific product or service that you want to push. It’s also a great way to reward your email contacts for staying on your mailing list. If you’re launching a new product, why not send an email that creates some urgency to drive sales or pre-orders? You can do this by including an exclusive offer that is only available for a certain period of time, or for a limited number of people. Similarly, if sales have started to drop for a specific product then you could use this technique to give sales a boost.

As you can see, there are plenty of different ways that you can use email marketing to keep in touch with your audience. This list isn’t exhaustive either; take the time to brainstorm some different creative ideas and who knows what you could come up with! If it seems relevant, you could even try a combination of these ideas. For example, why not include an exclusive promotional offer for anyone that is signed up to your monthly newsletter?

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