How to build an email campaign

Email campaigns are a great way to communicate a specific message directly to your customers. Overall, campaigns can help drive greater customer loyalty and allow shops to promote specific aspects of the business in ways that can be more valuable than some 3rd party marketing programs. All you need is access to customer data to get started. Refer to our article on exporting data here (link here once created). Below we outline how to build a campaign using your joe data and communicate directly to your customers. 

Have a clear campaign goal

In creating an email campaign, what is the main message you want to communicate to your customers? Are you looking to:

  • Advertise a promotion?
  • Promote a new seasonal item?
  • Introduce customers to your new digital loyalty program? 

Setting your campaign goal first helps give direction for what you include in your emails. 

Drafting the email(s)

Once you have your campaign goal figured out, draft out the email (or emails). (What is the recommended length of email campaigns? Messages?)

Be sure you conclude your email with a call-to-action. This is an action you would like your customers to take - whether it is ordering the new seasonal special, visiting the shop for an event, etc. 

Sending your email

  • Using your designated shop email, create a new email
  • Copy and paste all of the email addresses from your customer list in the BCC section (this ensures that customers won’t be able to see each other’s emails). 
  • Add your subject line and content to the body of the email
  • Hit Send

Email Marketing Tools 

  1. Find a tool that works best for your business. One great tool to use is MailChimp -it is free to sign up & extremely easy to use
  2. Utilize templates built into the tool and customize them based on your message
    1. Create a new email and select one of their easy-to-use templates
    2. Paste in your email list as ‘Recipients’ and Paste your email message into the body of the template
    3. Add your subject line, review everything, then hit Send
  3. Tracks email performance such as open rate & response rate so you know how engaged your customers are with that email. You can always compare different performance rates to see what your customers are most responsive to!