How to Execute Your Next Email Marketing Campaign: Guide, Best Practices & Examples (2024)

As of 2023, there are over 4.3 billion email users worldwide. More importantly, an astounding 77% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement in the last 12 months.

We know email works. But the challenge isn't about sending emails — it's about executing effective email marketing campaigns that drive results.

Unfortunately, most emails never get opened, read or acted upon. They either end up in spam or get thrown into trash by unimpressed recipients.

That’s why it’s crucial to follow up-to-date email marketing best practices, use tried-and-tested tools and learn from the best in the industry.

In this article, we’ll walk you through all things email marketing. You’ll learn how to create amazing emails, send them to the right audience, measure performance and more.

We’ve also included real-life examples and templates to inspire your own campaigns.

Before we dive in, here’s a short selection of 8 customizable email form templates you can easily edit and publish with Visme. View more templates below:

Table of Contents

• What Is an Email Marketing Campaign?
• How Email Marketing Can Help Your Business
• How to Execute an Email Marketing Campaign
• How to Measure the Success of an Email Marketing Campaign
• 5 Email Marketing Campaign Examples

What Is an Email Marketing Campaign?

An email marketing campaign is an email (or multiple emails) sent to a group of recipients with a clear objective in mind. Email campaigns allow businesses to engage with their audiences in a personalized, direct manner.

It's not just about broadcasting a message. It's about initiating a conversation, building relationships and driving results. And that’s why smart brands don’t just randomly send out emails — they plan and strategize.

It begins with defining a goal, like promoting a product or nurturing leads. This goal shapes the content, timing and target audience of your emails.

For example, let’s say you’re a software company planning an email marketing campaign to nurture new subscribers into customers.

Your first email might welcome subscribers and introduce them to your brand. The second might showcase your product’s unique features. Finally, a third might offer a free trial. Each email would help move subscribers towards the desired action — conversion.

Here's an example of a catchy email newsletter for your next email campaign.

How Email Marketing Can Help Your Business

In case you’re not fully convinced about the power of email for your business, here’s why you need to start sending out email marketing campaigns right away.

Reach a Large Audience

Email provides a wider reach than most (if not all) marketing channels. Think about it— who do you know that doesn't use email?

From your teenage nephew to your grandparents, almost everyone has an email address. That's billions of potential customers at your fingertips.

The best part? Email is used on both desktop and mobile. This means customers can read your messages anywhere and anytime.

Build Deeper Relationships

Email marketing isn't just about delivering a message — it's about fostering meaningful relationships with your customers.

Regular, ongoing communication through email builds trust and keeps your brand on top of subscribers’ minds.

Additionally, it’s easy to target and personalize emails. You can tailor content to your customers’ unique needs and interests, showing that you understand and value them.

This high level of personalization is a key reason why email consistently offers high engagement rates.

Track Measurable Results

When it comes to marketing, knowing what works and what doesn't is half the battle.

Thankfully, there are plenty of email marketing tools out there to help you measure the performance of your campaigns.

Track who opened your emails, which links they clicked and even how much revenue each email generated. All of these insights help you fine-tune your strategy and craft even more successful email marketing campaigns over time.

Save Time and Money

Email marketing can be incredibly cost-effective, especially when compared to traditional advertising channels. In fact, the average ROI for email is $36 for every $1 spent!

Using automation software can also help you save tons of valuable time. You can easily set up email workflows, personalization tags and more.

This means you can deliver highly personalized campaigns without spending countless hours on manual work.

How to Execute an Email Marketing Campaign

Made with Visme Infographic Maker

Now, let’s get to the meaty part: how to create and launch a successful email campaign.
The steps below will take you from start to finish — goal-setting, understanding the audience, designing the email and sending it out to the world.

Step 1: Choose a Campaign Goal

Before you even start thinking about your email content or design, you need to define the objectives of your campaign.

Having clear, specific goals ensures your campaign has direction and purpose. It’s also easier to measure performance when you know what you set out to achieve in the first place.

Are you trying to drive website traffic, increase product sales, re-engage inactive customers or nurture leads? You might be looking to get more registrations for an upcoming event.

Pro Tip: Brainstorm campaign goals with your team remotely using Visme’s whiteboard tool.

Whatever it is, your campaign goal will drive every subsequent decision you make, like defining a target audience, crafting a compelling message and even creating an automated workflow.

For example, let’s say you’re a fitness brand and your campaign goal is to increase the sales of your running shoes line.

Based on your goal, you might want to send your email campaign to a particular audience segment (e.g. those interested in running or shoes). You might also want to include a special offer or discount to motivate purchase.

You could also plan to send a series of three emails as part of your sales campaign — a product promotion email, a follow-up email with a discount code and a third email reminding subscribers to redeem the discount code before it expires.

Pro Tip: Easily create flowcharts to visualize your campaign’s automation workflow before setting it up and executing it in your email marketing software.

Step 2: Define the Audience

The right message to the wrong audience will likely lead to poor engagement. Knowing who needs to hear your message helps in crafting personalized content that resonates with them.

But defining your audience is about more than just knowing their age or location — it's about understanding their needs, interests and behavior.

If you're a clothing retailer, for example, you might segment your audience by demographics (men, women), purchase behavior (frequent buyers, occasional shoppers) or product preferences (activewear, formal wear).

Email marketing tools can help you segment your audience based on these characteristics. Remember — the more relevant your message, the higher your chances of engagement!

But how do you collect this data in the first place? Here are some ideas:

• Purchase and browse history
• Customer surveys and feedback
• Email opt-in forms with custom fields

Use Visme to design beautiful and interactive forms to collect contacts using premade templates and an intuitive editor. Go beyond names and emails and add custom fields to your forms like age, location, industry or favorite pet. Use this data to understand subscribers and send them targeted emails!

Step 3: Craft Your Message

Next, you want to create the meat of your email: the content. This includes the subject line, the body and the call-to-action(s).

And this where the magic happens.

Your message carries your campaign's value proposition — it's your opportunity to convince subscribers why they should engage with your brand or email.

Keep your email copy clear, concise and focused on benefits.

How can your brand or product improve your subscriber’s life? Why should they engage with your email or visit your site? What’s in it in for them?

Also, personalize the subject line and body copy as much as possible to resonate with each individual recipient.

For example, you could address contacts by their name or pull product info from their buying or browsing history. You can also leverage data like subscriber location, interests and age to send unique, tailored email campaigns (e.g. birthday discount.)

Don't forget to include a compelling call-to-action that aligns with your campaign goal.

Use actionable verbs to motivate readers to click. Here are some examples:

• Start your free trial now!
• Go to your cart
• Grab your [product]!

Step 4: Design Your Email

No one wants to read plain text emails — it’s not the ‘90s.

Add borders, a nice, bold email header, images, icons, animations, GIFs and other graphic elements to package your carefully crafted message.

Good design does more than just make your brand look attractive. It also enhances your email’s impact, improves readability and draws attention to any CTAs.

Choose a clean, mobile-friendly template that aligns with your brand's aesthetic. Visme has a bunch of great-looking email templates you can easily customize and use:

You can also tap into Visme’s built-in graphic assets to design your emails.

Browse millions of stock photos, videos, GIFs, illustrations, icons, shapes, borders and more from inside the editor — all free and editable!

Be careful not to go overboard — too many visuals can distract from your message.

Pro Tip: Can’t find the perfect image? Use the AI image generator to bring your vision to life.

Additionally, if you want to create a series of emails, you can do so quickly in Visme.

Save one email as a branded template and then reuse it as many times as you want. This helps you create multiple emails aligned with your brand and design theme.

Step 5: Test Your Email

Before you hit send, make sure to test your email.

This includes checking for any errors, broken links or display issues on different devices and email clients. But that’s just the basic stuff.

Go beyond that and run A/B tests with different subject lines, content, images, CTAs and sending times to see which version/s your audience responds to best.

For example, you might send an email with a humorous subject line to half of your audience and an email with a straightforward subject line to the other half. Comparing the open rates of these two emails can give you insights into what type of subject line your audience prefers.

Step 6: Send Email and Monitor Performance

Once you've dotted the i's and crossed the t's, it's time to send your email. Use your email marketing platform to send out your email at a time that's most likely to result in high open rates (this might require some experimentation.)

But your job doesn't end there. You also need to track your campaign’s performance and identify opportunities for improvement. This is where email analytics come into play.

Analytics data will guide your future campaigns, help you refine your strategy and continuously improve. You might even want to pivot current campaigns based on real-time insights.

We’ll talk more about measuring email campaign performance and the KPIs to track later on in this article.

How to Measure the Success of an Email Marketing Campaign

Made with Visme Infographic Maker

Measuring your campaign’s performance helps you understand what works and what doesn’t. It also gives you insight into how your audience interacts with your brand, helping you adjust your strategy and maximize the impact of future campaigns.

Most email marketing tools offer built-in analytics to help you track performance metrics. If you’re not sure where to start, here are some KPIs to keep an eye on:

• Open Rate: This shows you the percentage of recipients who opened your email. For example, an open rate of 20% tells you one in five subscribers clicked on your email. If your open rate is lower than you’d like, consider spicing up your subject lines to make them more enticing.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): This tells you the percentage of recipients who clicked on one or more links within your email. If your goal was to drive traffic to a specific blog post, a high CTR shows you’ve done a good job of motivating readers to do so.
• Conversion Rate: If open rate and CTR tell us about engagement, conversion rate tells us about the action. It's the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link within your email and completed a desired action like making a purchase or filling out a form.
• Bounce Rate: This reflects the percentage of your emails that couldn't be delivered. A high bounce rate could indicate that you need to clean up your email list, removing non-exisistent, inactive or incorrect addresses.
• Unsubscribe Rate: This is the percentage of recipients who decided they no longer wanted to receive your emails. A high unsubscribe rate could be a wake-up call to re-evaluate your content strategy and ensure you’re delivering value to your subscribers.

Measuring the success of an email marketing campaign is about more than just data collection. It's about turning numbers into narratives, patterns into action plans and insights into results.

Use this KPIs report template to visualize KPIs, track progress and bring your team (and management) up to speed.

5 Email Marketing Campaign Examples

Want to learn from real brands that are doing it right? Here are some handpicked examples of awesome email marketing campaigns to get your creative juices flowing.

1. BEE

Campaign Goal: Drive Blog Traffic

This email marketing campaign from BEE is a great example of how to get more eyeballs on your blog content. Their message is short and sweet: here are two articles to help you design high-converting landing pages. And their email puts those resources front and center.

Why it works

• Creative header copy grabs attention and establishes the theme
• Relevant and actionable CTAs under each post’s preview
• Great balance of visuals and text throughout the email

2. Casper

Campaign Goal: Increase Sales

Creating a product bundle is a great way to increase average order value (AOV). Casper knows this and promotes their bundle with a beautiful, irresistible email campaign. The highlight of this email is the 25% discount offer — but there’s a lot more to love about this campaign.

Why it works

• Bold and compelling header copy communicates the value upfront
• Descriptive, actionable CTA designed in contrasting colors is hard to miss
• High-quality images help readers visualize each product in the bundle
• Section for SMS opt-in helps collect phone numbers and reach contacts via text

3. GoDaddy

Campaign Goal: Re-engage Inactive Subscriber

GoDaddy keeps it super simple with a clean and crisp design, succinct email copy, bullet points and actionable CTAs. They don’t use any images in their email but they still establish a good balance with shapes and relevant icons aligned with their brand’s visual style.

Why it works

• Short and snappy copy speaks directly to the target audience (i.e. customers who’ve engaged with the brand before)
• Primary CTAs at both the start and end of the email are hard to miss
• Secondary CTAs (and offers) to convert subscribers with varying needs and goals

4. Asana

Campaign Goal: Drive Event Registrations

This email from Asana gets right down to business — no fluffy intros or explanations. This is exactly what their audience of busy executives needs. We also love that the design is minimalistic and on-brand, with lots of white space to improve readability.

Why it works

• Concise email puts the who, what, when and why of the webinar upfront
• Highlights important event info (day, date, time & timezone) in bold
• Short bullets draw attention to the key talking points of the webinar
• Speaker’s headshot and brand logo helps put a face to the name

Supercharge Your Email Campaigns with Visme

There you have it — your roadmap to executing a powerful email marketing campaign.

We've walked you through setting clear goals, identifying our target audience, crafting compelling messages, designing engaging emails and tracking success with key metrics.

Now, it's time to rev up your email marketing engine with Visme Forms. Build eye-catching, interactive forms (no coding required!) to turn casual website visitors into subscribers.

Why? So you can start sending them your amazing email campaigns, of course!

If you’re interested in learning more about email marketing, watch our video on newsletter design tips or browse our email templates to visualize your messages.