Email is still among the top marketing channels for businesses across industries. In fact, over 60% of small businesses (Hubspot stats) use email marketing campaigns to reach customers, while 37% of brands allocate more money to their email marketing budget. It’s apparent that email marketing still works.
One of the critical elements in any email marketing strategy is being well-organized, especially if you send a high volume of emails daily.
Once the total number of sent emails is measured in hundreds and thousands per day, managing and keeping track of the campaign tends to become challenging. It can quickly become overwhelming and lead to chaos.
Is there a way you can avoid this?
Of course, there is. Here are ten ways to better organize your email marketing campaigns.
Why is it important to have organized email marketing campaigns?
Excelling in email marketing at any scale boils down to keeping things neat and well-organized. Things tend to get out of hand if you don’t have a plan and schedule. All successful email marketing campaigns share a few things in common:
- Well-defined campaign goal
- Deep understanding of email audience
- Carefully selected email campaign type
- Perfect timing to send emails
- Tracking and improving the performance
If you don’t pay attention to anything from above, the chances are that you end up with disorganized email marketing campaigns.
What does it imply?
Your email copy won’t be engaging to your target audience, you’ll send emails at the wrong time, and you won’t be able to measure the success of your campaigns.
In other words, you won’t be able to achieve your goals and learn from your mistakes, but you will spend the money allocated to your marketing budget. Even though you won’t track your marketing key performance indicators, they will be along the following lines – poor open and click-through rates, high bounce rates, and a high number of unsubscribes.
Having a plan for every step of email marketing, ranging from creating email marketing campaigns to tracking their performance, is vital for its success. You will be able to keep your email marketing campaigns on track, identify and address minor setbacks in time, automate redundant tasks, and achieve your goals.
10 ways to better organize your email marketing campaigns and avoid chaos
Organizing your email marketing strategy will help you keep your subscribers engaged, maximize the effectiveness of your email communication and even convert them to customers. It will also allow you to learn and improve your marketing efforts.
Here are ten ways to better organize your email marketing campaigns.
Establish your goals
An email marketing campaign should always follow a goal. To strategically choose your course of action, you need to know what you want to achieve. You need to understand the reasons for developing and launching the campaign in the first place.
Ask yourself what the ultimate goal of this campaign is and what actions you want the people to perform after reading your email copy.
Organizations most commonly use email marketing to achieve the following goals:
- Boost website traffic
- Increase brand awareness
- Improve lead nurturing
- Enhance lead generation
- Capture feedback from contacts
Defining your goal will enable you to truly understand how to leverage email marketing and align your strategies to achieve it. Plus, it allows you to measure how close your campaign is getting to the established goal and how fast.
When establishing goals, you can use the popular S.M.A.R.T. methodology, which stands for:
- Specific – you should describe the goal in great detail
- Measurable – the goal should have a key performance metric assigned to it
- Achievable – the goal should be within your reach
- Relevant – the goal should be relevant to your business strategy and bottom line
- Timely – you should achieve the goal within a predefined time frame
Plan out every campaign in advance
While you need to track campaign performance and make small adjustments to achieve more optimal results, having a plan in advance is crucial for your success. Email marketing shares one thing in common with all other types of marketing – it requires a lot of planning upfront. You need to know your whats, wheres, whys, whens, and whos before you execute your strategy.
The plan will provide structure and help you avoid going for ad-hoc solutions when things don’t go as you expect them to. The plan also puts you in a position to become a better strategist. You can always go back to your email marketing blueprint to understand what has to be improved.
Here is a generic email marketing plan that you can modify to make your own:
- Who are the recipients of your emails – are you going to email only your current subscribers, people in your contact list, or people who already purchased from you (e.g., I will email the subscribers that came from our social media page).
- Why do you want to send the emails – the next section of the plan outlines the reason for sending emails or your goal (e.g., I want at least 50 people to visit a specific page on the website).
- Which type of email will you use – some email types are specific to certain goals; you must choose the type of email you will use (e.g., I will use the welcome email series).
- What will your email copy include – choosing the type of email you will use dictates the information it will include (e.g., I will introduce new subscribers to my brand, services, and products).
- How often will you send emails – you can send emails at different intervals (e.g., The welcome email series will be sent only once after a prospect subscribes to the mailing list).
- What will your email design be – you can choose an email visual design that reflects your website design and branding overall.
Define your target audience
Not all your customers are the same. There are numerous types of customers, each with unique needs, wants, expectations, and characteristics. To better organize your email marketing campaign and achieve optimal conversion rates, you must segment customers and create a relevant email list.
Audience segmentation is paramount here – instead of using one email copy and casting a wide net, you can personalize your emails. Even if you pursue one goal, you can have a unique email copy for each one of the segments of your target audience. The reason? Over 70% of consumers report they only engage with personalized messaging.
Creating a relevant email list involves finding contacts relevant to your campaign goal – if you want to increase brand awareness, you should automate sending welcome emails to new subscribers.
However, if you, let’s say, want to learn why there are so many cold contacts in your list (contacts that haven’t clicked your promotional emails lately), you can send surveys or try to re-engage them with a special offer and discount.
Have an email campaign calendar
An email campaign calendar is one of the best ways to keep everything organized. It’s a go-to resource for an efficient marketing team as it clearly outlines what you need to do and when. A calendar can also streamline the management of your campaigns and help you keep things tidy.
You don’t have to go above and beyond to create it. Basic knowledge of Google Sheets or Excel will suffice, as you only need a table with the following columns:
- Month
- Campaign name
- Email owner
- Email campaign status
- Target email list
- Send time (date and send time)
You can even include the subject line to make things even easier to track and find. Share the table with key team members, and you are ready to go. The table enables you to quickly skim through your schedule and see the status of every scheduled email campaign.
Choose the appropriate content and send it at the right time
The next thing you need to do to better organize your email marketing strategy is to choose the appropriate content and the right time to send it.
Choosing the right content with the right subject line has to do with your campaign’s goal and the target audience, which brings us to email types you can choose from:
- Welcome emails – great for introducing new subscribers to your brand and offer.
- Cart abandonment emails – these are used to engage people who showed interest in your offer and persuade them to complete the purchase.
- Newsletters – these non-promotional copies are perfect for sharing news, blog posts, and other useful content with your subscribers.
- Re-engagement emails – with these emails, you can engage cold contacts and find out why they stopped opening your emails or convert them into customers by offering attractive discounts.
- Promotional emails – promotional emails can help you highlight specific features or values in your products and services. They can also include testimonials to help you make customers take action.
- Holiday emails – with these emails, you can take advantage of increased shopping activity during holidays. You can inform your contacts about flash sales and discounts.
When it comes to sending your emails at the right time, you need to consider the following factors:
- Demographics of recipients (age and gender)
- Time zone
- Recipient’s device
With all these things in mind, you will be able to create an efficient schedule for your target audience. Since you will be tracking send time in your email campaign calendar, you will be able to cross-reference the performance of your campaigns and choose the best send times for your audience segments.
Use a dedicated email campaign software
Creating and launching successful email marketing campaigns in a makeshift manner is an obsolete method. There are too many things to track and stay on top of pre, during, and post-campaign. That is why many organizations use email marketing software such as BayEngage.
Dedicated email campaign software can streamline the process of designing, setting up, and monitoring your campaigns. With the right app in your hands, you can segment your target audience and personalize subject lines to boost engagement and open rates.
You can also save plenty of time if you have access to professionally designed email templates you can use out of the box. The best tools on the market also have A/B testing capabilities, so you can set your campaign for success before officially launching it.
Finally, thanks to access to analytics and reporting, you will be able to monitor the performance of your campaigns in real-time. You can also generate post-campaign reports to analyze the performance with your team and discover what could have been done better.
Make your emails easier to manage by using tags and labels
Given the benefits of sending personalized emails, you will most likely pursue this course of action. However, when you have several segments and a couple of email campaigns to manage, you have to send hundreds upon hundreds of emails.
To avoid the impending chaos, you must learn how to use tags and labels. Tags and labels often include a couple of words. You add these words to every email to be able to quickly identify, categorize, and find it.
In practice, it looks straightforward. Here are a few practical examples:
- Label the email sent to subscribers “Automated Welcome Message” – it allows you to generate performance reports only for emails that contain this tag and discover their impact on your overall campaign.
- Take advantage of A/B testing in your email marketing software – you can have different versions of post-purchase follow-up emails, each with a descriptive tag (e.g., Post Purchase Test1, Test2, and so on) sent to the same segment to identify the one that performs the best.
- Assign a unique tag for every contact in your list – it will enable you to see the complete interaction history in a matter of seconds and identify when the contact went cold or which email was the most engaging for that individual in particular.
Tags don’t only help you monitor targeted campaigns, but you can use them to quickly search through send emails history. Overall, tags and labels streamline email management and help you keep everything well organized.
Implement email rules
Email rules can help take your email marketing campaign organization to the next level. You can use the rules to automatically respond, flag, and move email messages. Depending on your software, you can add rules for email notifications and move messages to corresponding folders.
Let’s see how email rules can help you in real-world email marketing scenarios. You can:
- Automatically filter all email messages from the qualified leads – you can move these emails into one folder to ensure your sales team doesn’t lose track of them.
- Set a rule for follow-up for messages with specific words in the subject line – it can be pretty valuable for your customer service team as you can easily connect them to leads who took an interest in your offer and want to find out more about it.
- Keep your inbox clear of promotional emails – you can create a rule to automatically delete promotional emails, thus enabling you to concentrate only on the emails that truly matter.
These are just a few useful examples, and you can do a lot more with email rules.
Set reminders to stay on track
This one is straightforward. With an email marketing campaign plan in front of you, you can quickly identify the most critical stages of your strategy. With some help from reminders, you can stay on track and on your toes. That’s where your email campaign calendar comes in handy.
For instance, you can set up a reminder for email send time to ensure you don’t miss the most optimal time to send your emails.
You can also set up reminders for campaign analytics to help you remember to assess how your campaign is performing and make necessary changes.
Automate your response process
Responding to emails at scale is time-consuming, even for large teams. It can reserve so much of your time that you can lose track of your campaign and have chaos on your hands. Automating your response process is the most efficient way to address this challenge.
To automate your responses, you will need to set up triggers that will tell the email campaign software you are using to automatically send an email. There can be several triggers, such as a completed purchase, an abandoned cart, a subscription, a new discount, and a new blog post.
Final thoughts
Nothing beats well-planned and organized email marketing campaigns when it comes to improving open and click-through rates, boosting engagement, and increasing conversion rates. Email marketing can help you improve your brand presence and nurture relationships with your clients and customers.
The tips we have covered above will help you create, manage, and complete successful email marketing campaigns.
