In addition to your regular email marketing efforts, you may periodically decide to run specific email marketing campaigns. Such a campaign could be focused on marketing your book, getting sign-ups for your lead magnet, promoting a new product or service, or any other objective that you are looking to accomplish.

Keep the following in mind when creating your email campaign.

Know Your Audience

You may have one email list that you communicate with regularly, or perhaps you are building separate lists for different purposes. Consider who you are targeting in your campaign. If you are reaching out to request for people to join your book launch team, you may want to use a wider list of contacts. However, if you are reaching out to request that your team leave Amazon reviews for your book at a specific time, you need to be sure that you are only contacting those who are relevant.

Another way to target the right audience is by gathering information about your content from Google Analytics and your social media accounts (Facebook insights, for example). Always be sure to market to use permission-based lists only and to keep GDPR regulations in mind.

Plan Your Emails and Followups

Once you have your audience and goals down pat, its time to make a schedule of the emails and followups you want to send. First things first — write out a schedule containing the email type (welcome, request, etc.), the timing, and the desired outcome(s) so you can see the big picture of your campaign before diving into specifics.

The emails should be relevant, timely, and fun (remember, people’s inboxes are stuffed!). For example, if you are sending out an email to get people to join your launch team, make sure there is something in it for them — an exclusive group they get to be a part of, some special content they will receive, a free signed copy of the book, etc.

Make sure to send emails at a time they are likely to get read (not 2AM on Monday or 3PM on Saturday), and be sure to make it as simple as possible for readers to take any desired action (if you are asking for Amazon reviews, for example, leave detailed instructions on how to leave a review).

Write and Schedule Your Campaign

Okay, this is a really important piece of advice:

Write really good emails. 

It sounds simple, but in today’s world, it can be increasingly write emails that people actually want to open and read. We recommend making your emails about 70% valuable content and 30% sales/requests. Your email could contain:

• A valuable piece of content (blog post or something else actionable that can really help them).
• A survey and quiz — this is fun and will get them engaged with your content.
• A personal story/fun narrative. There’s nothing better for building a relationship with readers than putting a genuine personal spin on things.
• A call-to-action that is still respectful and not overbearing.

If you are unsure about your emails, don’t be shy about showing them to a friend or colleague before you hit that “schedule button” to make sure they are engaging, compelling, and clear.

Also — make sure your emails look nice. They don’t need to be in a super fancy template, but watch out for inconsistent formatting, broken links, etc.

Send and Test

Once you have scheduled and sent your email campaign — sit back and wait for the magic to happen! Just kidding. Now is the time for you to get into the nitty-gritty about what worked and what did not. Review your campaign analytics for things like :

• Open rate. You need to figure out what your optimal email open rate is, and that varies depending on industry. This article from SmartInsights can help you with that.
• Outcomes. How many people responded? Did you get the engagement you were looking for? You may need to address things such as email subject lines, copy, timing, and other details when doing email marketing testing.

Creating a solid email campaign is a lot of work, but it can be one of the best ways to boost your outcomes for a given project!

Margy Kerr-Jerrett

Margy Kerr-Jarrett enjoys reading, writing, and spending time in nature with her husband and daughter. Born and raised in Indianapolis, IN, Margy has been living in Jerusalem, Israel for the past three years.