Email Campaigns That Work (And Why Most Don’t)

Most businesses send emails and email campaigns to their audience, but few think about or build a true strategy behind what they’re sending. This lack of forethought and planning can have major consequences, especially for the purpose-driven brands that Mane Impact often works with; messages that feel irrelevant, confusing, or overly sales-driven frequently scare off people that would otherwise be interested in your brand. 

So if you’re looking to get a successful email campaign started, be sure to ask yourself: What exactly are you looking to achieve with your email campaigns? Common campaign goals focus on higher sales, lead nurturing through a funnel, education, retention, referrals, fundraising, and impact updates, but it helps to get more specific than that and really consider what emails will drive your engagement goals best.

In addition to developing a comprehensive, team-wide understanding of why you’re sending email campaigns, we recommend focusing on the following elements of a successful email campaign to ensure your goals are met.

Key Features of a Successful Email Campaign

A Quality Contact List

A contact list of people who actually want and choose to engage with your brand’s emails makes a huge difference. To achieve that list, you’ll need to strategize about how to reach them and be respectful of the people who opt into your messages.

First, make sure your email campaigns are only going to people who have actually subscribed to your emails. Importantly, make sure you remove anyone who has opted out or unsubscribed in a timely manner. There can even be legal consequences if you don’t do this right – the CAN-SPAM Act requires businesses to honor opt-out requests within 10 business days.

On a related note, make sure you’re regularly cleaning out and updating this list. One thing to look for and quickly remove is fake or incomplete listings. If it’s obvious that it’s a fake email, like “imadeupthisemailaddress@gmail.com,” you can safely delete that from your list. Many businesses also choose to remove real contacts after a certain period of inactivity, such as six months without an email open, in order to improve their future engagement results. In order to better serve your audience, we recommend crafting retargeted email campaigns for contacts who haven’t engaged with your content in awhile. You know they’re interested in your mission because they opted into your communications, but you’ll need to experiment with other ways to involve them in the work you’re doing in ways that are meaningful and relevant to your audience.

To improve the quality of the contacts that you already have in your database, collect additional information on your subscribers whenever possible. Full names, physical location, their business names, where they are in the marketing funnel, and even links to previous conversations with them can be extremely helpful for knowing who they are and why they are interacting with your brand. Having this information will help you segment your list, which is a huge part of making a quality contact list that you can use for more focused campaigns, like nurture and funnel campaigns. Build out standard operating procedures (SOPs) and best practices for your team to follow to keep everyone on the same page, working toward the same goal(s), and tracking data in a consistent and impactful way.

This then begs the question: How can you build a high-quality list in the first place? To attract and retain the right people, we encourage and help our clients to develop high-value content and lead magnets, make their CTAs stand out, and test various channels and strategies to reach new people who might be interested in the brand’s efforts. And finally, unless you trust the source of this list or have another valid reason, don’t purchase contact lists; build your contacts up organically for better results, conversions, and greater trust.

Creative and Clear Subject Lines

Subject lines are the first part of your email that any reader will see, and in many cases, it’s the only part they will see. After all, if they aren’t immediately drawn in by the subject line, they’re very likely to delete or ignore the rest of the email.

For creative subject lines that actually do their job of drawing people in, do the following:

• Keep them short whenever possible and keep it within the allotted character count (generally 20 to 40 characters, in order to optimize for both mobile and desktop readers).
• Make the main point of the email clear quickly, and make sure your subject line aligns with the inside content.
• Try to stay conversational and approachable, aligning content with your brand and messaging guidelines to not confuse your audience.
• Personalize whenever it makes sense – you can include their name, their company name, and other information in the subject line in artful ways, especially if you have this information stored in a CRM that automates campaigns at scale.
• Try an active-tense sentence or phrase with a subject, verb, and object structure.
• Consider including a brief CTA in the subject line if it fits and works for your goals.

Content That Gets to the Point

If you want people to actually read your emails, the quality and punchiness of the content goes a long way. Unless it’s a larger newsletter or you have another real reason to pursue a different path, try to stick to one key message per email to keep readers focused and interested. The actual writing should be designed for skimming, with short paragraphs, a conversational tone, and intentional spacing that makes the content easier to read. Because email campaigns almost always have a strategic goal, it’s all about finding the right balance of communication and promotion. A comprehensive marketing strategy will help to define this balance and ensure you’re not focusing too heavily on one or the other.

And it’s not just about the written content: Strategic, tight design decisions matter, too. Don’t overdo your design with too many colors or elements that might overwhelm your audience. Don’t try to cram in so much creative flair that the written content gets lost, but also don’t keep your emails looking boring and bland. Again, it’s all about the balance and finding ways to use both your written and visual elements to tell strategic stories that drive people to the desired campaign actions.

Visible and Direct Calls to Action

Use buttons or other design elements that make your calls to action (CTAs) obvious. Place these CTAs at strategic points in your emails — after a paragraph or two of relevant content, after an interesting video, etc. And if you’re using email analytics tools to measure your performance over time, you can also look at past performance data and try to place CTAs in locations where heat maps have indicated readers are frequently stopping and clicking. The possibilities may feel endless, so when in doubt, test different CTAs and placements to see what works.

Examples of strong and direct calls to action include:

• Learn more about climate justice here.
• Refer a friend for a 10% discount.
• Join our marketing team.
• Sign up for our online workshop now.
• Get our free e-book here.
• Book a demo with our advisors.

You’ll notice that these are short, descriptive, and clear. And while they encourage you to click now, they aren’t overly sales-y, urgent, or coming across as spam. They’re simply offering something of value to an audience that will be interested in that value-add if it’s presented well. You can slightly change up the language with each email iteration you send in your campaign, but if you have a specific goal in mind, make sure each version of the CTA is working toward that goal. Make it easy for people to take the next step in engaging with your brand.

Planned Timing, Frequency, and Consistency of Email Sends

It’s all about finding the right cadence for your business when it comes to the timing, frequency, and consistency of email campaigns. You don’t want to send all of your emails at the same time or on the same day of the week, because you might be missing a key segment of your audience that will never check their inboxes during that time (or who get a huge influx of emails at that time and tend to overlook all of them). 

You also don’t want to send emails so frequently that you overwhelm your audience, but at the same time, sending too infrequently can cause you to fall out of their peripheral vision. Like what we said about figuring out content that works for your audience, it’s all about finding the right balance. You can always experiment and try different timing and frequency approaches to see what lands best. Analytics are your best friend here, because they’ll highlight any potential trends or pitfalls so you can pivot and better market to your audience. But no matter what you end up going with, stay consistent; don’t fall off the map in the middle of a campaign when people are expecting to hear from you.

Thoughtful Personalization

Looking back to what we said before about personalized subject lines: With the right tools and demographic data, you can thoughtfully personalize not only your subject lines but also the body of your messages, who receives what messages, what videos are embedded into the emails they receive, and more. But this level of personalization is only possible if you really know your audience, both as a whole and as individuals. 

You can hyper-personalize the content you send only if your audience information is robust enough for you to build well-defined segments into your contact list. From there, automation and workflow options are the best ways to send personalized content out without having to write individual emails for individual subscribers. Examples of mass personalization that can be achieved through automation include welcome sequences, funnel-level-specific campaign progressions, and other email chains that work with if-then logic or behavioral triggers. CRMs like HubSpot and EcoSend offer many built-in tools and resources to help you do this kind of personalization well.

Frequent Testing and Revisions

The biggest fail that we see from companies that are sending email campaigns is that they’re not actually measuring outcomes or using that data to adjust for future outcomes. As an email sender, you should be testing, experimenting, and revising your approach frequently. Even if things are working fairly well, you never know if a slightly different approach could improve your numbers if you never try it out.

A common place to start for email testing is A/B Testing. With this approach, you can send multiple email options at once, which gives you the chance to analyze what subject lines, CTAs, and email lengths work best for your audience, for example. Some of the elements that you may want to pay extra close attention to measuring include CTA performance, how many visits you generate to connected landing pages, and how many clicks you get on your highest-profile pieces of content; these will all help you determine if your campaign is leading to any real action or impact in the greater organization.

Throughout the process of designing and redesigning campaigns, make sure you’re actually looking at your metrics and what they mean. Review open rates, clickthrough rates, conversion rates, unsubscribes, and when and how these numbers are being reached. Heat maps can also help you get into the more granular aspects of your emails, seeing where people hover and click most so you can assess why those might be popular portions of your emails. 

Remember: Don’t just look at this data. It’s only useful if you use it. Once you’ve collected data, at least on a monthly basis but, ideally, more frequently than that — use it to make data-driven improvements. And then measure it all over again.

Why Many Email Campaigns Fail - And How Mane Impact Can Help

Email campaigns may fail for many of the reasons we’ve touched on above: Mixed messages are being sent, too much content is in one email, emails are getting scheduled inconsistently, the content ignores readers’ wants and needs, or the subject line and content aren’t “catchy” enough. Most often, it’s that there’s no clear strategy in place, especially for measuring performance and pivoting later.

If you’ve never paid this much attention to your emails and how they’re doing, chances are you’ve made some of these mistakes. Our team at Mane Impact pays attention to these common email pitfalls and many others, all while honing our craft for stronger proactive strategies, to send emails that deliver real value to our clients’ and their initiatives.