An effective email marketing campaign takes much more than simply sending out sales pitches and occasional correspondence to those on your email list. If you want a truly effective email marketing campaign, you should implement the following three steps.

Step 1: Begin with your customers.

Consider this question: Are you providing the right email to the right audience? The fact is that almost every type of email marketing, that is develop by a competent marketing professional, can be effective. But this is only true if you are delivering to a receptive audience.

An example would be offering a promotion for free shipping. This will be an effective strategy for those who have already tried, and loved, your product. They are the ones who will be interested in purchasing it and this incentive may be what pushes them to make the purchase.

If someone does not know the value of the product that you are promoting as of yet, the free shipping incentive will not be effective and likely just be sent to the recycle bin.

This is why you must take time to consider this question. If you have a list of thousands of email recipients, but only 100 actually like your item enough to purchase with the free shipping promotion, but there are many others who mark you as spam or unsubscribe, then the email promotion is not right for your overall, majority audience

Keep in mind, while there is not necessarily right or wrong email marketing efforts, there is effective and ineffective strategies when you consider a specific audience. This is one of the factors that make email marketing a challenging endeavor.

Step 2: Start working to deliver exactly what your customers want.

Chances are you are already doing this. Once you have determined exactly what it is that your customers want you should work to give it to them. Remember, your email campaign should not be used strictly for sending promotions out, but also for valuable content and transactional emails.

Consider each of the following types of emails to send to your customers:

• Transactional notifications and emails: This is often overlooked and forgotten. What is it that your customer wants to hear after a purchase? Warranty info, follow ups on the product or fulfillment specs? Is that too much?
• Selling/promotional emails: This is the perfect opportunity to provide a specific offer and receive a conversion;
• News/Nurturing/Educational emails: Email marketing efforts are more than simply sending correspondence to those who have bought from you, or nudging others to make a purchase. You need to deliver the value that your customers want in order to create an effective email marketing strategy.

Step 3: A/B testing.

This type of testing will help you to build a customer theory. This type of testing provides you with the ability to understand how your customers will react to real time, real world situations. This will take the guesswork out of your email marketing campaign.

Using these three steps you will find that you can create an email marketing campaign that reaches the majority of your customers, instead of a small segment. This can be extremely valuable and increase your conversions and profits.