Photo by Jim Murphy

Email marketing can be a really difficult thing for newcomers to break into, especially when you look at all the misinformation and confusion you can find on the web. People get the impression that email marketing is a thing that only hired gun copywriters with four-figure hourly fees can comprehend. It may be that there is just a little bit of magic involved, but no more so than in any other form of marketing. If you take the time to investigate your market thoroughly, you find yourself making smart decisions and attaining success faster than you would have guessed.

A good starting point is to look at your campaign’s overarching purpose. How would you summarize the campaign’s purpose in just one or two words? What’s the best case scenario, and what’s the worst case scenario? You may be thinking you just want to build a list and promote one product with it. And that can work out very well for a lot of different types of products. On the other hand, what happens when your mailing series is over? Then the potential clients who haven’t purchased yet will just walk away. If you want to make email broadcasting an element of your long-term strategy, you should plan on accumulating and maintaining trust over time. In that case, you can do some of your market research as you go along. Every action that a recipient takes is more data to feed back into the campaign.

Which is why the first step in any successful email marketing campaign is traditional market research. That way you will know exactly who you are selling to and why. Remember that markets are not uniform. Even in very highly targeted mailing lists, you’ll still have some individuals who react one way and others who react the opposite. The way to control this is by splitting up your lists into smaller pieces based on the individual traits that emerge. Modern email list management software such as ActiveCampaign’s Email Marketing software package make this trivially easy.

The next step is settling on a visual format for your message. Try to make sure that your email is laid out in a way that allows for the kind of interaction you’re looking for. If you want someone to click on a link, for instance, think about the aesthetic experience of the recipient. It makes sense for your email to look a lot like your site, then. When the web page and the email message match, it takes away some of the doubt about whether the site is genuine.

Next, you’ll want to consider what type of content will be appropriate for your email campaign. People will get accustomed to getting a certain type of message from you. So, for example, imagine you’ve been sending out a monthly newsletter for a while with some industry-specific ideas and information. If you use the same writing style and format for your sales messages, you can leverage the existing authority and trust that you’ve established for your mailing list.

Finally, you need to consider ways to get a majority of your recipients to open up and read the announcements you send to them. There’s a little bit of magic that goes into this. Lots of things come into play. If you know anything about copywriting, you’ll probably already be thinking about the headline. Essentially, the headline is an advertisement for your advertisement.

Way too many email marketers abandon this kind of copywriting strategy once the headline is written, and they lose readers as a result. The thing is, most email-reading interfaces display the first line of your message as a kind of subheading for your message. This acts like a second headline. It’s a second chance to sell your message. Lastly, focus on the hours that readers in your market segment will likely be ready to open up and read your message.

Something you should never hesitate to do with your email campaign is to try new things. The more you do, the more you’ll develop a comprehension of what works and what doesn’t. In the long run, you’ll be amazed by the way you become so in tune with your market that you naturally understand what will or won’t work. It’s like magic.