There are several agencies that will offer you services to manage your ongoing email marketing campaigns, and there are several Email marketing tools as well as marketing automation tools that are available in the market today to facilitate you sending bulk email campaigns. Some of the more popular ones include Mailchimp, SendGrid, Mailer-lite, iContact, Vertical Response, Constant Contact and Drip. Each one has its own advantages and unique features. They come with their own pricing structures. So, depending on your requirements, you can go ahead and select the service that you feel comfortable with.

Yes, Absolutely, anyone can run an opt-in campaign. You need to have a clear strategy for building your opt-in lists. Let’s realize that people have a lot of options, so what is it that you are going to use to lure them to opt-in to your list?. Once your list starts growing, you can decide to engage often with the list and serve them content that they will prefer to consume. When you have opt-in campaigns, your open rates, click rates as well as response rates are a lot better as these subscribers are actually waiting to hear from you and receive your content.

The first metric you should track is bounce rate. If you have a bounce rate, you will start running into problems with your email marketing tools as most SMTP providers will not tolerate a high bounce rate. Bounces can be hard bounces as well as soft bounces. Hard bounce typically means that the email address does not exist at the server at all. A soft bounce could mean that the email ID is temporarily not available. It may be down or the mailbox may be full. The other metrics, which are important to track include open rate, click rate and response rate. If you are getting a >10% open rate, then you are within the average open rates for campaigns. As said earlier, with opt-in lists, your open rates can be significantly higher.

Email campaigns have multiple objectives, typically building awareness and generating leads. The number of responses that you receive from the campaign can be directly measured as the number of leads/inquiries that you have received from the email marketing campaign. If your objectives were to create awareness, then some of the metrics that you could track could include clicks/views of the landing page or views to the website link provided in the email. Set clear objectives ahead of the campaign, so that you know whether you were successful or not. As you start developing multiple campaigns, you will improve on these metrics, as you will be able to understand what works and what does not.

All email campaigns are targeted at individuals. So if you want a positive outcome, make sure that you are able to personalize the emails to the extent possible. People hate receiving mails from unknown people, so to the extent possible, try and build references before you get to the main topic of your email. Some people use HTML email templates and some use text mailers. Depending on the objectives and the target audience you are trying to reach, your performance will vary. Nowadays, people also use a lot of responsive email templates. This means that these mails will render well and are optimized for desktops as well as for mobile platforms. With so much functionality available on the phone, it is common for a lot of people to access their mails on the mobile platform.

Having clean lists ensures that you bounce rate is lower. Personalization of emails ensures that open rates and response rates are better. Interesting and curiosity generating subject lines work very well in ensuring that there is better campaign open rate.

Several email marketing tools offer you the option of using interactive and pleasing HTML email templates for email campaigns. It is easy for you to use one of these templates and use that for sending out campaigns. Alternatively it is also possible to custom-design a HTML email template from scratch and then import that into an EDM tool to be sent out as an email marketing campaign.