When deciding on an email service provider, it’s important to understand the jobs you want get done.

Three (3) of the most frequent jobs marketers and business owners perform on an email marketing software includes; managing contacts, creating and sending email campaigns, and monitor campaign performance.

We will outline these jobs in more details below.

1. Contact Management.

The most important job when using an email marketing software is managing your contacts. Depending on the platform you use, your contacts can have mobile numbers to be used to send sms.

The core feature of contact management in an email software is the ability to add, edit and delete contacts. Adding contacts is usually done by copy and pasting, uploading via csv or other file types, manual entry or integrate via contact forms. Depending on the size of the contact database, performing segmentation is important. This is highly recommended even if you have a small list.

Think through the various possible customer segments or profiles for the customers your serve and create segments for each of them accordingly. Examples of segments can include, new and existing customers, customers by value and interest.

Ensure any web forms capture customer segments correctly by thinking about them in advance and build respective forms to capture the data. This is very helpful if a landing page is used to perform this database generation.

Avoid adding role addresses to the list of contacts. Role addresses are those email addresses that begins with specific roles in an organization. Example info@, marketing@ and hello@

Most of these emails are filtered by spam which can cost email credits and reduce the possibility of having your domain name flagged.

2. Email Campaign Design and Distribution.

Once the contacts have been uploaded and organized, the next likely job is creating and sending email campaigns. This is perhaps the main reason to use an email marketing software. All email marketing software is built in with drag and drop campaign creation tools to design your campaigns. Design elements can be added to create a rich interactive email. Some platforms allow copy and paste design codes from elsewhere which will have the same rendering.

When designing the campaign, use a combination of quality images, videos and text as much as possible to organize content. Include header, body and footer content as part of the campaign design layout. Using call to action in the campaign will help to get readers acting immediately which is what every campaign should have.  Link the campaign content to relevant website, landing page or social media. This will be helpful in building traffic to web content that are relevant to search engines.

Most email marketing campaigns are responsive to mobile, which means there should be no difficulty reading it on a mobile device.

After completing the campaign design, decide if whether to schedule the campaign to run immediately or later. Be sure to test the campaign on mobile and desktop with a single email address before releasing to the main contact list. Check for any errors and make the necessary corrections.

3. Email Campaign Reports and Analytics

Now that the email campaign is released, start monitoring the activities via the reporting tools. The email marketing software used should be able to provide analytics for open, clicks, bounces and spam as basic performance metrics. Some providers allow you to check device types – what mobile device is being used to open your email campaigns, geographic locations – country where your readers are at the time of opening the campaign, browser types – what kind of web browser used and email types – the kind of email addresses used, whether free mail (gmail, yahoo, Hotmail etc) or private email.

Depending on the campaign performance, consider scheduling a resent to readers who didn’t open the first. This can be done several days after and can be scheduled automatically in most software.

If you need professional help to design and launch your campaign, talk to us. We’ve design and launch more than 6,000 campaigns over the last 5 years.

For over 10 years MI Group has been helping small and mediums size business to grow using online technology and digital media tools. We’ve helped our clients make and save millions of dollars through demonstrating our level of expertise. We partner with Facebook and Google to help with advance advertising strategies for optimal benefits.