How to Build an Effective Email Marketing Campaign: A Step-by-Step Guide
Reading Time: ~5 Mins | Written By: Juliana Bermudez
While new and shiny digital marketing platforms have come and gone, email marketing continues to be one of the most powerful tools for engaging customers, building relationships, and driving sales. With email marketing you can communicate directly with your audience in a personalized way. But with your subscriber's inboxes flooded daily with promotional emails from all sides, how can you ensure your emails stand out?
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the essential steps to building a high-performing email marketing campaign that will help you achieve your goals.
Step 1: Define Your Goals
Before crafting your campaign, identify what you want to achieve. Common email marketing goals include:
Growing blog interactions through insights via eNewsletters
Driving website traffic
Boosting product sales
Increasing number of purchases from special offers
Retaining high-quality, return customers
Growth in social media following through email communications
Increasing your subscriber list through website signups
Setting clear objectives specific to your business goals will help you design an email strategy that delivers results. Now that you have outlined the goals for your campaign, we can move on to step 2.
BONUS TIP: Keep in mind that you will want to come back to your goals on a bi-annual basis to ensure they are still what your business needs. Keep your email campaigns updated accordingly!
Step 2: Build and Segment Your Email List
A well-targeted email list is key to success. Here’s how to build and segment it effectively:
Grow Your List: Invite your customers, followers, and peers to sign up for your eNewsletter using tactics such as:
a website sign-up, and popup forms
lead magnets such as free guides or discount codes
social media promotion
ask customers to sign up in order to receive promotions when making purchases online or in-store
Doing this ensures your audience grows to include those who are genuinely interested in receiving communications from you. Having a healthy list helps ensure you have fewer unsubscribes, an audience that will engage with the content you share, and stays informed about what matters to them!
Segment Your List: Group your subscribers based on factors such as demographics, purchase history, interests, or engagement level. A few examples of ways you can segment include:
Segmenting based on where your subscribers live, to share location-specific news and deals if you have more than one brick-and-mortar store or restaurant.
Segmenting based on age or gender (or both!) to share more specific product recommendations related to them.
Segmenting audience members based on how inactive they are, so you can create a campaign to nurture their relationship with your company.
This allows you to send personalized, relevant content that will help ensure your audience is receiving content they really care about, and in turn, will boost your email engagement.
Step 3: Choose the Right Email Campaign Type
Now that you have a strong audience built out, you're ready to craft your first email, but first things first - you need to decide what email campaign type you’d like to create. There are various email formats to consider, including:
Welcome emails – Introduce new subscribers to your brand.
Promotional emails – Announce sales, discounts, or special offers.
Newsletter emails – Share company updates, valuable information, blog posts, or industry news.
Abandoned cart emails – Remind customers of incomplete purchases.
Re-engagement emails – Win back inactive subscribers.
Choose the format that best aligns with your campaign goals. Get a more in-depth breakdown of the different campaign types in this Hubspot blog. In the next step, we’ll go over what content to include in the body of your email.
Step 4: Crafting Compelling Email Content
The content within your email campaign needs to be both engaging and informative to help incite your audience to action. Some key elements of this include:
A Strong Subject Line – Keep it short, intriguing, and benefit-driven. Use promotions, questions, and emojis to help you do this. Here are some examples:
“LAST CHANCE: 50% OFF Sale Ends Tonight! ⚠️”
“Are your tires prepared for the upcoming weather?”
“We miss you! Here’s a special deal… 💸”
BONUS TIP: Ensure you keep your subject lines short so they aren't cut off in the email platform your audience is using. Keep to 30-50 characters or 4-7 words.Personalization – Use the recipient’s name and tailor content to their interests. Here are the same subject line examples as above, but with some personalization added to help pique interests further:
“LAST CHANCE, JOHN! 50% OFF Sale Ends Tonight! ⚠️”
“John, are your tires prepared for winter?”
“We miss you John! Here’s a special deal… 💸”
Every email platform does this differently. Depending on what you use, do some research to find out how you can implement merge tags to personalize your campaigns:Concise and Engaging Copy – Write clearly and keep your message focused. Try to avoid too much copy and risk your message getting lost in a wall of text. Write out what you’d like to say, and then edit it to fit within 2-3 sentences. If you need to include more, invite subscribers to keep reading via a CTA leading to a blog post or product page on the website.
Clear Call-to-Action (CTA) – Guide readers to take the next step, whether it’s making a purchase or reading a blog post, by including a CTA button or link. Here are a few simple examples:
“Read more >”
“SHOP SALE PRODUCTS”
“Get yours now!”
Step 5: Design for Readability and Mobile Optimization
Your emails should look great and be easy to read for everyone, on any device. Best practices include:
Using a clean, visually appealing layout
Keeping paragraphs short and scannable
Including eye-catching images and buttons
Ensuring a responsive design for mobile users
Implementing a decent amount of space between elements
Avoid using images that include important text or are important to the design of your email that you wouldn't want to get lost - some email platforms such as Outlook automatically remove images from email communications.
After you’re done designing your email, send it to yourself and have a look at how it performs on both your desktop and mobile version of your email platform, to ensure it looks professional in both formats. Make any changes if needed! Better to have to send the email to yourself a few times than send it out to your audience and have it not perform as well because they couldn't follow along on their phone.
Step 6: Automate and Schedule Your Emails
Automation saves time and ensures timely delivery to your audience. You can set up automations such as:
Drip campaigns to nurture leads over time
Triggered emails based on user behaviour (e.g., welcome sequences, cart abandonment reminders)
Customer celebrations (e.g., birthday promos, anniversaries, ect.)
Implement consistent scheduling of your regular communications to keep subscribers engaged without overwhelming them. Based on your goals, send email communications on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis so you're staying top of mind.
Step 7: Monitor Performance and Adjust
Track key metrics such as:
Open rates
Click-through rates
Top links clicked
Ordered Product Value
Unsubscribe rates
Use these insights to help understand how your audience is engaging with your emails. Tweak your subject lines, content, and sending frequency to improve performance over time based on how well they performed.
Use these steps to create a well-planned email marketing campaign that can drive engagement, nurture leads, and boost sales. By defining goals, segmenting your audience, crafting compelling content, and optimizing performance — you can build an email strategy that resonates with your audience and delivers the results you're after.
