A good exercise routine can rejuvenate your mind and body, helping you stay active throughout the day. By working out on a regular basis, you can achieve your goals and direct your own success. The benefits of exercise aren't limited to the body, however. When it comes to email marketing, following a rigorous workout routine will help you to elevate your strategies and strengthen your efforts.

Here's a simple three-step workout for a better marketing outreach. Just follow these instructions, then rinse and repeat.

Step 1 - Warm-up

To make your email marketing workout as smooth as possible, you should ease into it with a few simple yet vital exercises:

Outline an email marketing plan

Before you start sending out campaigns, you'll have to create a plan. Combine your ideas and thoughts into a diagram or map so you easily understand the flow anytime. Your checklist should also cover any contingencies to be considered before creating your campaigns.

When developing your plan, make sure to answer these questions:

  • What's the purpose of this plan?
  • Who's my target audience?
  • What course of action will lead to the next step?
  • What should my emails look like?
  • What are some alternative options if something goes wrong?
Re-engage with inactive subscribers

Sometimes, your mailing lists will have inactive subscribers who don't engage with your emails, but are interested in your business. You can win them back easily by following a proper re-engagement technique.
 
Some ways to reconnect with them include:
  • Personalised email campaigns asking their consent to receive further emails
  • Surveys with questions that help you learn why they left
  • General polls that reward subscribers for their participation
  • Coupons and discount offers with the next email you send.
Group based on segments and tags

After removing disengaged subscribers, the next step is to organize your lists. You can create segments based on different attributes like geography, subscriber preference, sales cycle position, lead stage, etc. When you closely observe your recipients' activities, you can study their behavior and interests. Use this information to categorize your subscribers by assigning tags.
 
The main advantage of grouping is apparent when you send out your campaign. You can easily send relevant messages to people based on their tag or segment.
 
Step 2 - Basic workout

Once you're done warming up, it's time to start your workout. Gear up for the first part of your routine!
 
Create relatable content

Content is the first thing your subscribers will notice in an email, so concentrate on creating high-quality content. Keep your language crisp, direct, and engaging. Make your templates colorful and well-designed to capture your readers' attention. Focus on the key deliverables of your product either by highlighting your points or including informative images.
 
Your campaign should look perfect when opened on any device and for this, you need to use responsive templates. Personalisation in the content is an important requirement for keeping your subscribers hooked to your brand.
 
Look out for any mistakes before sending

Mistakes happen, even when you're diligently creating a campaign. Poorly-written subject lines, imprecise pre-header text, sloppy content arrangement, broken links, incorrect sender and reply details, and dysfunctional CTAs—these are all things to keep a watchful eye on.
 
A good method to inspect errors is to send a test campaign to your own email address before sending it to your recipients. Through this, you'll be able to get a complete look at your campaign, and spotting errors will be much easier.
 
Schedule your emails at the most effective time
 
The final and important exercise of this set is scheduling your email campaigns. What's the purpose of creating the best campaign when you don't send it out at the right time? Your subscribers may live in different time zones. To maximize impact, you should send emails during your subscribers' peak work hours.
 
Do a bit of research to understand which days work best for you—Tuesdays may give you more opens for a particular location, while Thursdays give you success in another location.
 
Step 3 - Intensive workout
 
We've come to the last part of your campaign workout. It requires patience, research, and consistent action from your end.
 
Observe the performance reports

Don't just stop once your campaign has been sent. See if your emails have resonated with your audience and learn about number-based metrics like opens, clicks, bounces, etc. From the open and click rates, you can get a better idea of the kind of design and content strategy you need to follow for the rest of your emails.
 
Additionally, taking stock of how many people have unsubscribed or bounced for your campaigns will help you improve your future engagement. If you've promoted your campaign on social media, measure your performance through likes and shares.
 
Test your emails thoroughly

Once you've studied your previous campaign reports, you will get an idea of what works well with your audience. Based on this, create variants for each subject line, content, or sender information. Run a thorough A/B testing on your recipients to see which variant is received better.
 
When testing, choose a small percentage of your audience, divide them into two sections and send two different versions of the campaign. After testing it for a while, see which version has received the best response and use that for the remaining portion of your audience.
 
Automate follow-up messages
 
Make sure to stay in touch with your subscribers by sending follow-ups. While creating a follow-up message, mention your previous message to create a common thread across your campaigns. Set intervals and plan for a sequence of emails through automation.
 
Send out a series of automated messages, each covering a well-defined concept. For example, an onboarding series for your new subscribers, product-related nurturing emails for your leads, and event introduction emails for your trade show/event attendees etc.
 
Just as physical exercises can boost your happiness level, keeping you healthy and strong, these three-step exercises can help you accelerate your email marketing results and make your business more profitable.

 

By Aishwarya Ashok, product marketer for Zoho Campaigns

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