Creating your first email campaign: a beginner’s guide
Diving into email marketing is a big, exciting step, but it can also come with a lot of questions. Where do you start? How do you make sure your emails don’t get ignored, or worse, lead to unsubscribes? The good news is, email marketing isn’t as complicated as it seems and when done right it’s one of the most effective ways to connect with your community, build relationships, and drive sales.
We’ll walk through everything you need to know to launch a successful first email campaign. You’ll get a breakdown of how to define your audience, craft compelling emails, ensure your messages look great on any device, and track your performance so you can continuously improve. Whether you are sending your first email campaign or looking to fine-tune your approach, these foundational steps will help you create campaigns that engage, convert, and foster long-term subscribers.
Step 1: Know your audience and goals
Before drafting your email, it's crucial to define your target audience and set clear objectives. Understanding who your audience is will help you tailor messages effectively.
First, define your target audience
Consider factors such as:
- Demographics: Age, gender, location, job title, and income level. Ask yourself, who are you trying to reach?
- Behaviors: Purchase history, browsing habits, and past engagement with your brand. What’s the best way to present content that will interest them?
- Preferences: Topics of interest, preferred content formats, and communication frequency. How and how often do they want to hear from you?
Then, set clear objectives
Establish measurable goals to guide your campaign's strategy and assess performance. Base your goals on your reasons for starting an email campaign in the first place. What do you want to accomplish and how can you measure your success? When the going gets tough, returning to your overarching goal(s) gives you a way to look back at your progress or redirect if you aren’t getting quite the response you want. Measurable goals should have a clear success point and a time frame. For example:
- Increase email-driven website visits by 25% within the next quarter.
- Generate 50 conversions from email over the next 60 days.
- Increase membership renewals by 15% before the next annual renewal cycle.
Step 2: Build a targeted email list
Email segmentation is the process of dividing email subscribers into groups (or segments) based on specific criteria. Email subscribers can end up in multiple segments, depending on factors like age, location, and behavior.
Segmentation ensures that subscribers receive relevant and personalized content. This leads to higher open rates, improved deliverability, increased conversions, and lower unsubscribe rates. A personalized approach also enhances customer experience and strengthens brand loyalty by proving to subscribers that you understand their preferences.
Ultimately, segmentation can help you optimize engagement, reduce spam complaints, and drive more sales.
As a beginner, when should you segment? If your audience has different interests, behaviors, or engagement levels, segmentation helps send the right message to the right people. However, if your list is small or your campaign appeals to all your subscribers, segmentation may not be necessary yet.
Here are some examples of segments you can easily identify:
- Purchase history: First-time buyers vs. repeat customers.
- Geographic location: Targeting customers based on time zones or local events.
- Sign-up source: Website subscribers vs. social media sign-ups.
- Engagement levels: Active subscribers vs. inactive ones.
Step 3: Write and design with impact
Crafting compelling content and design is essential to capture your audience's attention. There are three key places you can focus on to get the best result from your first campaign.
Write an engaging subject line
Your subject line is the first impression, make it count by:
- Keeping it concise (50 characters or less).
- Using action-oriented language.
- Personalizing with the recipient's name or past behavior.
- Creating a sense of urgency (e.g., "Last chance to save 20%!").
Craft engaging and concise content
In the email body:
- Address your audience's pain points and offer solutions.
- Use short, scannable blocks of text
- Incorporate bullet points to break up text.
- Include a clear call-to-action (CTA).
- Pro tip: once you’re comfortable sending manually, take a deeper dive into automation to learn how you can personalize every email with a subscriber’s name and offer tailored content that leverages contact data like purchase history, location, interests, or job title to further personalize content.
Design for visual appeal
Ensure your email is visually appealing by:
- Using a clean layout with consistent brand colors and fonts.
- Incorporating high-quality images, GIFs, or emojis balanced with text.
- Employing responsive design that adapts to various screen sizes.
Step 4: Optimize for mobile
Optimizing email campaigns for mobile is essential because mobile has such extraordinary engagement rates—don’t risk missing out on valuable engagement because of a design glitch. To ensure a seamless experience, use responsive email templates that adjust to different screen sizes. The checklist below will help you cover your bases before hitting send.
Common mobile email mistakes
Avoid:
- Using large images that slow loading times.
- Creating lengthy subject lines.
- Placing CTA buttons too close together.
Best practices for mobile-friendly emails
- Use responsive templates that adjust to any screen size.
- Keep subject lines short and readable.
- Ensure CTA buttons are large enough for easy tapping.
- Test emails on multiple devices before sending them.
- Pro tip: most Email Service Providers (ESPs) will have a functionality that allows you to preview your draft campaigns on different email clients and device sizes.
Step 5: Test, analyze, and improve
Continuous improvement is key to email marketing success. A/B testing allows you to compare different elements to determine what resonates best. If you start this from the beginning you’ll be more informed faster! At its simplest, the strategy is to send an email to half of your subscribers or a defined segment, then send another that tests a slight alteration and see which email performs better.
Before you launch into A/B testing, determine what your test objective is. For example, you may want to increase the number of people who open your emails.
Now that you know your objective, you can identify the key metric you’ll be observing. Attempting to increase the number of people who open your emails means your key metric is open rate: the percentage of recipients who opened your email.Here are some other examples of key metrics:
- Click-through rate (CTR): Percentage of recipients who clicked a link.
- Conversion rate: Number of recipients who completed the desired action.
- Bounce rate: Percentage of emails that didn't reach inboxes (we want to decrease this one).
Next, pinpoint what element, or test variable, you’ll be swapping out between email A and email B. To identify how you can increase open rates, testing different subject lines is the perfect place to start.
You can A/B test anything between your emails, as long as you’re consistent. As a beginner, we recommend you only A/B test one variable at a time so it’s easy to pick a clear winner and understand which change made an impact.
Test variables could include:
- Subject lines
For example, "Limited-Time Offer" vs. "Exclusive Deal Just for You".
- Email layouts
For example, single-column vs. multi-column designs.
- CTA wording
e.g., "Shop Now" vs. "Claim Your Discount".
- Link placement
e.g., link in the intro vs. body text.
Although A/B testing sounds labor intensive it can be interesting…and enlightening. A/B testing shows you how to make every email count by pointing out exactly what does or does not land with your audience. Analyzing the results will help you refine future campaigns. By following A/B testing best practices, you’ll have a data-informed send strategy.
Use these strategies to jump-start your first campaign
Starting your first email campaign might feel like a big step, but with a little planning, it’s absolutely doable. Focus on getting to know your audience and setting clear goals from the start.
Build a segmented email list, create engaging and mobile-friendly content so you can reach subscribers effectively on any device, and keep testing and tweaking as you go. The key is to start small, apply these strategies early, and grow with confidence. By setting yourself up with a solid foundation, you’ll make continuous improvements much easier—and see better results right from the start!
