You’ve gained a subscriber. You’ve sent your welcome email. Where do you go from here?

Promotional email campaigns are the most common, and probably the most familiar type of email. You likely even have one or more in your inbox at this very moment. Some brands choose to send out several of these emails in a week, which can come off impersonal and not differentiated from one to the next. Eventually, many subscribers simply “Mark as Read” and move on with their day without even giving the message a glance.

While necessary, these emails must be executed properly in order to garner positive results. Keep reading this second edition in our “9 Must-Have Email Campaigns” series to learn more about sending promotional emails to your subscriber base.

Why do you need promotional email campaigns?

Promotional emails are the bread and butter of your marketing campaigns; they get the word out to your subscribers about brand updates, new products, deals, and other helpful information. By sending ongoing emails, you keep your business on the radar of both existing and potential customers. In a survey from Fluent, 68 percent of millennials said that promotional emails have influenced their purchasing decisions.

However, rather than sending these as one-off emails, you need to create a unified campaign with progressive emails that build off of one another to deliver a cohesive message out to recipients.

6 Tips for an effective promotional email campaign

To create impactful promotional emails, try the following:

1. Set goals in advance

As with all marketing efforts, you should start strategizing your email campaign from the end objective and work your way backward. If you choose to send emails on an ad hoc basis without considering how each contributes to your larger goal, when you go back to aggregate your data, it will be difficult to interpret how it all ties together.

When thinking through your email campaign, what is your goal? What will constitute a successful campaign? Think through these answers on a campaign level rather than on an individual basis.

2. Segment your audience

Segmentation is vital in getting your audience to open and read your promotional emails. Through segmentation, you can divide your audience based on characteristics or behavior, then tailor messaging to be ultra-personal to every single subscriber.

You can segment your customers based on a number of criteria, including:

1. 1. • Demographics: age, gender, location, income level
      • Email engagement: opens, clicks, inactivity
      • Website activity: pages visited, content clicked
      • Purchase behavior: products purchased, total spent
      • Current phase placement in the customer journey

3. Create a compelling subject line

As mentioned above, consumers are flooded with promotional emails on a daily basis, so you’ve got to make your stand out and inspire people to open it. The subject line is the first thing they see, and will ultimately determine whether they decide to click. In fact, 47 percent of email recipients open an email based only on the subject line.With this in mind, craft a subject line that will give subscribers pause and make them want to see what’s inside. Make sure the subject line you write accurately represents the content inside the email; the last thing you want to do is mislead your followers.If you aren’t sure what type of subject line is more likely to grab recipients’ attention, try testing between multiple versions. Speaking of which…

4. Test promotional messages

You can’t read your subscribers’ minds, so you’re not expected to know exactly what is going to get them to engage with your content, especially when you’re just starting out. This is where testing can be beneficial. You can test almost anything within an email, including subject lines, images used within the email, elements of the copy, and calls to action. Just make sure you stick to testing only one variable per email, otherwise you’ll have trouble distinguishing what made an impact on differences in engagement.

5. Include a clear CTA

Emails aren’t sent out just because; they are sent in hopes of directing subscribers to do something, whether that’s clicking to a landing page on your website, activating an offer or anything else. Make it easy for them with a clear call to action (CTA). Don’t overwhelm your email audience with multiple CTAs, however, as this can confuse them as to what action they should take or even lead them to moving you to spam. Stick to one CTA that fits into your objective, and make the patch clear for subscribers to get there. Emails with one CTA have a 371 percent higher click rate.

6. Measure results

Once one email campaign ends, another must begin. But instead of just doing what you’ve always done in regard to emails, you want to make improvements based on how past emails have performed. Using your objective as a benchmark, analyze opens, clicks, conversions and other metrics for every campaign to understand what worked and what didn’t. Look closely at A/B tests; if one version performed significantly better than the other, use the higher performing email as a template for others moving forward. Take learnings from each email to the next to ensure you keep improving and maintain your audience’s attention.Having a proactive promotional email campaign strategy will help your team reach the goals you set out to achieve, and will be effective in keeping your customers entertained, engaged and eager to see what comes next.Don’t miss the next blog in this collection, where we discuss seasonal email campaigns.

Must-Have Email Campaigns: 3. The Seasonal Email