A Deep Dive Into Email Campaign Management

Why should you care about email campaign management? 

Well, for starters, email is the preferred form of business communication for 73% of millennials. It also packs a huge return on investment (ROI), generating about $38 in revenue for every dollar invested.

If you want to be successful in business, you need to make email campaign management a part of your strategy. Which raises the question…

What Is Email Campaign Management?

There’s a lot more to email campaigns than just writing emails. Ideally, you have a reason for creating your emails. You have goals, and a plan to reach them.

Choosing what to send and when to send it are elements of email campaign management.

And then you have list building, automations, and maximizing delivery and engagement… if it seems like a lot, that’s because it is. But we’ve got you covered.

We’ll show you the best practices for email campaign Management in 2024.

Email Campaign Management: Best Practices For 2024

A writer on our blog sent an email to his list every week for almost three years without seeing significant revenue growth. 

His problem? He was churning out random emails without a plan.

Email campaign management starts and ends with planning. While every email should be able to stand on its own, each message should contribute to an overarching goal.

How Do You Organize Email Campaigns?

To organize your campaign, you have to be clear about what you’re sending out and when you’re sending it. 

Before you even get started, we recommend you use a content calendar. Just do it. You’ll avoid a lot of trouble later on. 

Here are more best practices for email campaign management.

Setting Goals and Understanding Your Audience

When you plan your email campaign with clear goals, you’ll save time and get results. Let’s dive a little deeper.

Defining Clear Campaign Goals

What do you want to accomplish with your campaign? 

Are you trying to build your list? Do you want to have more click-throughs? Are you trying to get your readers to purchase a product or register for an event?

The more specific and defined your campaign goals, the easier email campaign management becomes. 

Identifying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

The best goals are the ones you can measure.

How many new readers do you want to reach? How many sales or conversions would you need to consider your campaign a success? What is your target clickthrough rate?

Conducting Audience Segmentation 

Different audience members will respond to different messages.

If you're writing for restaurant owners, you should have different content for a sushi bar and a steakhouse, at least some of the time. Segmentation will make all your email campaigns more effective. 

Creating Buyer Personas

Segmentation means separating your readers by their differences. But a buyer persona unifies a segment by what the readers in that group have in common. 

Think about traits that all or most of your readers have. Imagine you are writing for one person who has all of these traits.

Give this person a name. Think about their age and their interests, their career and lifestyle, where they live, and whether or not they have children. Picture them reading your content. Where are they when they open your email? What do they look like? What are they wearing?

Write your content for this persona and it will resonate with everyone in that segment.

Why Trust Us? All beehiiv writers are carefully vetted for their knowledge and experience. Jacob Bear has been writing email campaigns for nearly a decade, and was recently named a Top Copywriting Voice on LinkedIn. He learned about campaign management the hard way.

Building and Engaging Your Email List

Once you’ve figured out your segments and buyer personas, you won't have to reinvent the wheel each time you manage a new email campaign.

Now it's time to find more readers.

Opt-in Strategies for List Growth

Growing your list is an ongoing priority.  It's important to have strong landing pages so more readers will subscribe. 

With landing pages in place, you can leverage social media and other channels to drive traffic.  

If you have the budget, you might think about using boosts and other paid strategies. You can often get the best results from a combination of paid and free list-growing strategies.   

Maintaining List Hygiene and Compliance

As you grow your list and manage campaigns, your email newsletters must be compliant with a slew of regulations that affect your deliverability. 

If not, your emails are likely to end up in the spam folder and all your hard work will be wasted.

Most email platforms will automatically remove hard bounces and give you the tools to clean your data, in addition to giving readers the option to opt out with a click. 

The best platforms also maintain a good reputation so your delivery rates are high to begin with.

Crafting Compelling Email Content

There's no secret to good content. It all comes down to providing what your readers want.

Ultimately, compelling email content just comes down to a few things:

• Write content that's relevant to your readers

• Make your emails both entertaining and valuable 

• Share useful information your readers can act on

Utilizing Visuals and Multimedia

Most email newsletter service providers have tools to embed video and other multimedia content. 

Just remember that this content may take longer to load and that some of your readers won't be able to see it. Make sure you’re still putting any critical information in the text so none of your readers will miss it.

Automation and Optimization

Email campaign management isn’t complete without taking care of a lot of things that go on under the hood. This is where automation and optimization become important.

Designing Responsive Templates

Remember your readers will be using different devices when they read your email campaign. The size and dimension of a screen can vary a lot over different devices.

It's important to use an email service platform that incorporates responsive design. Responsive content will respond to the type of device on which it’s being viewed. The content will fit your user's screen whether it’s a 16-inch desktop or an iPhone.

You don't need to hire a programmer to code your emails for responsive design. A good email service platform such as beehiiv provides responsive design automatically.

Implementing Email Automation

Automation involves creating a series of steps, or a “journey,” for your reader to follow. Typically when they take a specific action (such as clicking a link), there is an automated response (such as triggering a sequence, adding or removing a tag, or assigning the reader to a segment).

Conducting A/B Testing for Optimization

A/B testing involves dividing a list or segment into two groups, A and B. Each group receives an email that is identical except for one variable. 

If Group A gets a better response rate than Group B, then you know Group A’s version of the variable makes the email more effective.  

Conduct A/B tests with two variables that are different enough to elicit more than a random response. (Testing a red button vs. a crimson button doesn’t help)

Always have an unambiguous call to action in your A/B testing. You want to be sure a variation’s low performance isn’t the result of readers not knowing what to do.

Analyzing Performance and Staying Updated

Email campaign management is almost impossible over the long term unless you have a way of measuring the success of your efforts.

Learn how to use and interpret analytics, and you will rapidly boost the effectiveness of every email campaign you manage. We'll break it down for you.

Measuring Email Marketing ROI

ROI refers to Return On Investment. If you typically generate $30 in revenue for every $1 you spend on email marketing campaigns, then you have a 3,000% ROI. 

To understand your ROI, you need to understand all your metrics.

Analyzing Metrics for Success

There are lots of metrics you can look at. Open rates, click-through rates, sales, new subscriptions, referrals... 

The best practices for email campaign management involve having specific goals, as we mentioned above. When you have a goal, you can focus on just a few critical metrics that show how well your email campaigns are moving you towards the goal.

Staying Informed About Email Marketing Trends

Finally, it's important to stay informed about what’s happening in the real world. 

It’s good to know about all the latest tools and tactics, but there's more to it than just keeping ahead. You'll also know what your readers want. 

For example, Dylan Scott and Dylan Eastwood of WGMI Media grew their list from zero to 60,000 in just seven months. One of their secrets was to monitor emerging trends and figure out ways to contribute.

Managing Email Campaigns: Closing Thoughts

We covered a lot of territory here. Email campaign management isn't easy, and you have to wear a lot of hats to do it.  

There are lots of tools that will help you manage analytics, deliverability, templates, etc. However, it can be tedious to toggle between different apps every time you create an email campaign.

Using a comprehensive platform is critical, and the best-kept secret of email campaign management for 2024 is beehiiv. 

beehiiv enables you to completely customize your email with a no-code editor that’s easy to use. We have a suite of streamlined analytic tools to help you optimize your email campaigns. 

Responsive design and deliverability best practices are built-in, and beehiiv even offers AI to help you create content faster.

We have a robust program to grow your list with boosts, recommendations, and referrals. And unlike many email newsletter platforms, beehiiv doesn’t penalize you for having a larger audience. 

A key strategy for email campaign management in 2024 is to start your beehiiv newsletter.