How to Succeed in Email Marketing: 
Step by Step Guide

Introduction

Over the past six or seven years, I along with my technical team have built successful email marketing campaigns for clients in the healthcare and e-commerce industries. I’ve also went through the online behaviors and acceptance time of clients from different zone and profession.

One of my notable healthcare client is a leading biotechnological company in Europe. In the e-commerce industry, I have worked for a leading e-commerce company from Indonesia and several renowned companies from Bangladesh.

Together with client, I created complex campaigns incorporating polls, surveys, behavior-driven messaging, and custom content such as e-books. If I estimate all of my works, then it’s no less than a thousand. My goal was to help clients gain customers for life and progressively establish greater customer trust, and mission was to create an environment where trust becomes the business’s ultimate currency.

I accomplished this by understanding the contact based on behaviors and data collected through the lifecycle of trust development. Customer retention increased, cancellations declined, and engagements were deeper. Here is how I did it.

How to achieve Email Marketing Success

Each of these steps are so detailed that it can be another detailed article. Step by Step guides are shared below-

#Step No- 1. Get into the email INBOX

• Getting your email to your contact’s inbox is a journey that covers a significant distance in a short time. To succeed, you must navigate through email servers that assess whether you’re a spammer, if your client has blocked emails from you, or if your email delivery software could not deliver because their reputation was questionable at the time. This can happen sometimes when, for example, a lot of spam may have been sent from accounts on MailChimp, ConstantContact, or any other platform. Inbox providers such as Google and Microsoft might block emails from those software vendors.
• Email deliverability will vary by vendor. Check your system’s email deliverability rating here.
• Using your email marketing software, you can view your overall and individual contact delivery rates. You should be able to see if someone’s address is bouncing or if they’ve unsubscribed.
• Avoid the spam box by creating content that passes spam filters. For example, avoid clickbait words such as ‘free,’ ‘ Exclusive offer,’ ‘Don’t miss out,’ and ‘You’ve won.’ Many email marketing tools have spam checks to help you remove these and other phrases that will mark your messages as spam. The example below shows the email passing the software vendor’s spam checks..

#Step No-2. Personalize the email

For all the benefits of AI and Automation, they can also be a curse for achieving your desired results. Google has already downgraded thousands of websites built with AI-generated content. In the future, email may be evaluated similarly to how spam is currently filtered.

• Invest in learning how to write quality copy and conversion-focused emails.
• Avoid AI-generated & AI-sounding emails, that are stale and lifeless. Use AI only to refine ideas, but write with your personality and business brand in mind.
• You don’t have to make every email a sales pitch. So, each email should deliver applicable value from your point of view and personality. 
• Avoid hammering the recipient with unhelpful and repetitive content and requests to buy.
• Get the salutation right. Parse out the first name. Don’t send emails with salutations that come through as “Dear <Full Name>.” If you don’t have the first name, set your system to open with “Hello” or “Hi.”
• Make the email contents as conversational language. Write it like you are speaking directly to the reader.

#Step No-3. Set the email automation sequence to trust

Marketing automation systems are great technologies for creating powerful email sequences. The best use of email automation is to develop a conversation through emails that mirror face-to-face meetings, such as mutual sharing and getting to know each other.

• Trust building requires a progression of positive engagements, just like meeting someone at a party. Your email sequences should build upon each other, adding to your audience’s confidence and trust in you.

Collected from salesman.com

#Step No-4. Reduce email fatigue through your cadence

• Change the cadence of your email sequence to maintain a natural, conversational communication style. Avoid patterns that look like automated emails.
• Set up your automations to break the email flow from daily emails by skipping one day, then three, then two, and then one. It will look more natural to the recipient and give them a break to digest the content sent earlier.

Created by the author

• Continue the sequence until they take action. I’ve had some email sequences that ran over 6 months and found a surprising number of sales that occurred in months 4, 5, and 6. There could be many reasons why someone doesn’t buy in the first week of your campaign!

#Step No-5. Listen — Understand — Respond

• “Listen to understand, not to respond.” This means that sometimes we half-listen because we’re thinking of how to respond before hearing the whole story first. The same is true for email marketing in complex, high-ticket sales.
• Don’t send information that doesn’t match their profile of interests or requests. Based on your collected data, go deeper and create content that they feel is written specifically for their interests. 
• Collecting first-party data should be a high priority. The more you know about the contact at the earliest connection stage, the more effective your long-term campaigns can be.
• Knowing your audience armed with this information can help you build greater trust, send relevant information, and create an authentic relationship that can include sales and referrals.

#Step No-6. Categorization and tagging

• Tag contacts so you can be specific in the content and messages they should receive. A tag might indicate who purchased specific products or who took a specific action, such as downloading an e-book.
• Segmenting using tagging based on your collected information can refine your selling process and create a better-informed audience as you’re delivering customized information and offers.

#Step No-7. Implement a detailed unsubscribe page

• Get to know your marketing automation system and configure the unsubscribe settings. When contacts click the unsubscribe link in their emails, they will see a form with the different lists they are subscribed to.

#Step No-8. Monitor performance data

• Don’t get overly excited about open-and-click rates, which may be somewhat inaccurate based on your marketing system. Use them as a guide to understand what’s happening with your audience.

Average email Open Rate by Industry. Collected from HubSpot

If you would like to know more or discuss, feel free to reach out to me.