Many email marketers fall into the trap of knowing when to send emails, but not how to send emails. Sure, they’re able to create a campaign, send it out to the masses and field the results, but there is far more to email marketing than just following the steps to create and send a campaign. Here are the steps we recommend going through when sending emails.

 

Step 1: Define a goal and plan

What do you want to accomplish with your email? What are your long-term goals as well as short term ones? What type of message do you want to send or template do you want to lose? These highly legitimate questions need to be asked before you send out your HTML email or newsletter.

Step 2: Choose a template and graphics

What type of template(s) will you use when you send campaigns? It’s a good question. Go over your options and choose one or more based on what you’ll use them for. You might want to choose one template for your sales emails, one for your how-to tips, and so on and so forth. Once you’ve made these decisions, stick with them so you can build a sense of uniformity with customers.

Step 3: Get your contact list in order

Go through your email list and strike out the hard bounces and the soft bounces that seem to never go anywhere. Segment your email list for better targeting. Once your contact lists are in order, you can easily set up your campaigns to go out with optimal results.

Step 4: Create your copy and subject line

Your copy has to appeal to your recipients and give them a reason to absorb what you have to say. But just as important – perhaps more so – is your subject line. Your subject line is the most important bit of info you have to get customers to even open your emails. Spend extra time crafting it.

Step 5: Send test emails

Before you send out any email campaign, you must send out test emails first. The main reason for this is to catch mistakes, but you’ll also need this to see just how your layout will look in different major email service providers like Yahoo!, Gmail and more.

Step 6: Schedule and send

Pick out a good day to send your emails. Tuesday through Thursday are good days, as is Sunday, when people review their emails before the week starts. Schedule your campaign in advance so you have time to make changes should something go wrong.

Step 7: Review your reports

A week or so after your campaign is sent, go through your tracking and reports and view how well your campaign did. Compare your email campaigns side-by-side and see if there was any difference in open rates. Create graphs and print out your data if you want to give it a more detailed look. Once your data is in your hands, you can adjust future campaigns based on what you’ve found.