Email marketing is a part of digital marketing strategies used by SMBs and big organizations to reach their existing clients and a wider prospecting audience base. This method uses emails to send promotional messages, informative pieces, and advertisements, and customer outreach. 

An average email user receives around 120 emails everyday. It means most of the emails will either get ignored, deleted, or moved to the spam folder/junk. 

So, what makes an email stand out from the others? Well, an highly converting email marketing campaign requires a deep understanding of the market, proper planning, and smart execution. 

Let’s walk you through this informative guide on how to develop email marketing campaigns that converts. 

Without any further ado, let’s get started! 

What is Email Marketing? 

Email marketing is a direct marketing approach for businesses that uses personalized emails to educate their email list about their products and services. 

It is also used to persuade their audience into taking specific actions such as making purchases, booking demos, signing up for newsletters, etc. 

Is Email Marketing Still Effective in 2023? 

Many marketers might think that email marketing (specifically cold email) is dead with the advent of social media platforms. But stats show otherwise. 

There are almost 4.37 billion email users all over the world, which is still higher than the total number of social media users. Another groundbreaking study has revealed that 72% of all people prefer to receive business communication over emails. 

In other news, email marketing messages are likely to generate 5x more open rates than Facebook, the largest social media platform. 

These two stats prove that email marketing is not only going to be there, but it proves to be the single most powerful marketing channel for businesses. 

9-Step Guide to Creating an Email Marketing Strategy that Converts

1. Identify The Goal of Your Campaign

Email campaigns are a huge part of a business’s marketing strategy. But to make your campaign a success, you must identify your email marketing campaign’s motive, ideal audience base, and goal. 

You may create a campaign to nurture and convert leads, drive sales, re-target old customers, or to offer value to your subscribers. And for each of these campaigns, the objective, approach and strategies differ from each other. 

Once you get a clear understanding of your motives behind your email marketing campaigns, it will be easier to create the campaign and measure its success. 

Pro tip: Once you are done researching your prospective clients, make sure you create an Ideal Customer Profile based on the available data. It will help you personalize your campaign. 

2. Segment Your Audience

List segmentation is the next crucial step for sending highly-personalized, value adding, and targeted email campaigns. 

Once you decide the purpose of your campaign, it’s time to decide who would receive your emails.

Usually, you can divide your audience in a few categories – existing customers, active email subscribers, and/or new leads. And this is why list segmentation is important to send relevant email messages that fulfill each group’s needs. 

You can gather relevant customer data through various methods, including: 

• Acquiring Data at Sign-Up
• Surveys
• Monitoring customer purchase history
• Lead magnets

3. Personalize: Subject Line and Email Body

Personalization is the key to your prospects’ hearts. The goal of personalization is to create communication based on personal relationships. Personalized emails make prospects seem valued and herd, boosting conversion rates. 

On that note, never use a generic email template, as it will come off as indifferent & detached, and can drastically reduce your email open rates. Generic emails might land in spam folders.  

As the subject line is the first thing your prospect notices, it is important to write an eye-catching and personalized subject line. For example, subject lines that contain prospect names see email open rates of 18.30%. 

Here are a few examples: 

{Prospect name}, got a minute? 

Have you heard of…

{prospect business name} + {sender business name} = Revenue 🚀

Write a unique email body based on your ideal customer profile and prospect data. Take your prospects’ demographics (location, age, job role, income, sex, etc.) into consideration and research their pain points to write unique messages. 

Even if you are using pre-made cold email templates, make sure you customize them to increase engagement and click-through rates. 

4. Include a Crisp and Lucrative CTA

Though many marketers would argue, a groundbreaking study has revealed that a clear and concise CTA (instead of multiple CTAs) increases click-through rates by 371%.

Multiple calls to actions can mislead your audience and might weaken your primary claim. So, it’s better to stick to a personalized email followed by a strong (read persuasive) and clear CTA. 

Write the CTA in a convincing and persuasive tone, but make sure you are not pushy.

5. Optimize Your Email for Mobile

According to a Litmus study, mobile devices accounted for 42% of all email opens. And the number is only rising everyday.
If you want your email marketing campaign to be a success, you must optimize your emails for mobile devices. 

Here are a few tips on how you can do that: 

• Make subject lines shorter – around 25-30 characters. 
• Although pre-header text is often ignored, you should add preview texts to optimize for mobiles. 
• Keep your email copy short and simple – no more than 150 characters. It’s best to keep it within 100 characters. 
• Make CTA buttons clear and bigger. 
• Don’t use heavy images. 

6. A/B Test Your Email Variations

No matter how beautifully you craft an email, the success of an email marketing campaign depends on several factors. That’s where A/B testing or split testing comes handy. 

You can check what kind of email works best for your audience by running several versions of a campaign through your internal channel. Once you A/B test your options, go for the one that generates maximum email open rates and click-through rates. 

Besides choosing the right email, you can also modify your campaigns for better performance.

7. Use an Email Marketing Tool for Automation

First things first: what is email automation? 

Email automation is when you automate your email marketing efforts from lead gen and list segmentation to personalizing and sending automated emails. These tools make the sales flow faster, more efficient, and lets the sales reps focus on closing deals. 

With email automation tools, you can: 

• Personalize your customers’ experience
• Focus on critical tasks such as building connection with clients and driving sales
• Improve customer retention rates
• Shorten the sales funnel and fasttrack sales
• Reach a wider audience
• Get real-time data and analytics

Unlike ESPs such as Gmail or Outlook, emailing tools like Smartlead makes sure your emails land on prospects’ inboxes, and always stay compliant with internet laws (CAN-SPAM act, GDPR, etc.), and lets you track real-time data analytics for creating the roadmap for the next campaign. 

Wrapping Up

Even in 2023, with the given popularity of social media platforms, email reigns as the most powerful digital marketing channel for businesses. You can create a successful email marketing campaign that converts with research, testing, and attention to solving problems or providing value. 

The best way to do it is by using an email marketing tool or a cold emailing tool. Take advantage of automated email list segmentation, email warmups, AI-personalization, and custom conditional following-ups and launch highly-targeted email marketing campaigns to scale your business.

Author Bio:

Vaibhav is the founder of smartlead.ai and smartwriter.ai, cold outreach and personalization platforms used by Stripe, GaryVee, Meta, and 16000 other businesses using SEO. Before this, he exited an AI business analytics business & bootstrapped his software consultancy, which built 55 funded startups that, in total, have raised $200M & generate >$14M in Monthly Revenue. He posts actively about SEO, growth marketing, and product.