How To Create Email Marketing Software

Creating an email marketing software is a major undertaking, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. In this tutorial, we’ll teach you how to set up your own e-mail campaign application using PHP and MySQL in under two hours. We’ll tell you why we chose the tools we did and how we configured them. Since you may not be familiar with the technologies used, we include step by step instructions detailing exactly how to install things, as well as code samples for your reference.

How To Create Your Own Email Marketing Software

It may be one of the oldest forms of digital communication, but email still reigns supreme when it comes to usage.

Sure, there are other newer methods of communicating with your audience and customers. Communication methods like social media, live chat, and many others. However, with a user base of over 4 billion people, email is the king of marketing channels.

Additionally, email marketing has an ROI of $38 for every dollar spent, meaning it deserves a place in every marketer’s toolbox. 

Email marketing is still ranked as the most effective marketing channel, beating out social media, SEO, and affiliate marketing.

Why is that? With all the hype over new channels, why is decades-old technology still one of the most effective marketing strategies?

Despite the rise of social, people use email more than other platforms. After all, what’s the good of marketing to someone if they’re not there?

Data shows that most people are on email—and the number increases every year.

In addition, with email marketing you own the connections—you don’t have to worry about algorithm changes tanking your reach.

That’s why building a successful email marketing campaign is more important than ever.

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There’s a problem—most people don’t know how to do it right. (In fact, you’ve probably seen those people in your email box.)

This post will walk you through tips and strategies for executing impactful email marketing campaigns.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is the act of sending promotional messages to people in mass quantities. It typically is to generate sales or leads and it may contain advertising.

Remember: You’re a Guest in Their Inbox

People are inundated with interruptions, pitches, and advertisements everywhere they look.

Though you might think your email is special. To the reader, your email is one in a million—and not in a good way.

This is why it’s important to remember where you are and use good manners.

Getting into someone’s inbox is like being invited to their home for dinner. If they ask you to take your shoes off, you respectfully do so.

It’s the same with email marketing, so before we begin I’d simply like to remind you to be on your best behavior at all times and remember… you’re a guest in their inbox.

Now, let’s talk about how to build your email marketing strategy from the ground up.

How Does Email Marketing Work?

Email marketing is one of the top-performing strategies, in no small part because it’s fairly intuitive and often automated.

In its basic form, an effective email marketing campaign requires three essential elements:

1. An Email List

For you to pull off successful email campaigns, you need an active email list. This is a database of email contacts who have expressed interest in receiving marketing communications from your brand.

There are many ways to build an email list. One of the easiest is to create a lead magnet (also called an offer) your target audience is interested in, like a coupon, in exchange for their email addresses.

2. An Email Service Provider

An email service provider (ESP), also known as an email marketing platform, is software that helps manage your email list. It also helps design and execute automated email marketing campaigns.

Using an ESP allows you to automate actions triggered by your target audience’s behaviors. These enable you to personalize each interaction with them, meaning engagement and conversion rates generally improve.

3. Clearly Defined Goals

You can use email marketing to achieve many business goals. For example, you can use email marketing to:

• drive sales
• boost brand awareness 
• generate and nurture leads
• keep customers engaged
• increase customer loyalty and lifetime value

To execute an effective email marketing campaign, your email list, ESP, and goals must align. Then, you can get to work.

The first step is to segment your email list according to subscriber demographics or actions.

Next, create an email or series of emails designed to get consumers to do something (your goal).

Finally, use your ESP to send emails and monitor the campaign automatically.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Email Marketing

Just like any other marketing channel, email marketing has pros and cons. Let’s briefly dive into some of the more significant ones:

Advantages of Email Marketing

Email Is Permission-based

When a customer trusts you with their email address, it’s the virtual equivalent of being given the keys to their house. Gaining permission to enter rather than showing up uninvited increases the chances of engagement and conversion.

Affords You Direct Access to Your Audience

You can communicate directly with subscribers on their schedules. In addition, because people check their emails daily, your email is likely to be viewed.

Gives You More Control

With most other marketing platforms, you don’t own the platform. If the platform ceases to exist, all your hard work sinks with it.

With email, you own the relationships you forge with your subscribers.

More Personalization Capabilities

You can use demographic or psychographic data to create personalized and hyper-targeted campaigns. Research shows segmented and personalized campaigns increase revenue by as much as 760 percent.

Measurable

Measuring the effectiveness of a marketing campaign is crucial, and automated email marketing makes measuring your campaign a breeze.

Scalable

Email marketing campaigns can scale without putting a strain on your resources or compromising quality.

Disadvantages of Email Marketing

Tough Competition

Standing out in a cluttered inbox can be quite a challenge. You have to be creative to ensure your emails get noticed and opened.

You Need an Email List

With email marketing, you must already have an email list for your campaigns to be effective.

Tricky Rules and Regulations to Navigate

There are a lot of rules governing the use of email for commercial purposes. Common examples include GDPR, CAN-SPAM, and CCPA. All of these state you can’t send unsolicited emails.

Unfortunately, some subscribers also report your emails as being spam even after they subscribed to the list. As a result, your sender reputation takes a hit.

Delivery and Deliverability Issues

Getting your email to land in receivers’ inboxes is not guaranteed. To run effective email marketing campaigns, you must contend with delivery and deliverability issues.

Email Marketing Examples

Let’s briefly look at a couple of email marketing examples for a bit of inspiration.

Teaonic

Teaonic is an e-commerce brand specializing in organic, healthy teas.

Subject line: Getting Low On Wellness?

What does this email get right?

• Great subject line: The subject line focuses on the target audience’s main pain point, i.e., improving their health.
• Leverages color psychology: The bright, warm colors trigger feelings of health and happiness.
• Well-timed: The email is targeted at people who have purchased the product and is sent when the customer’s supply is about to run out.

Bluehost

Well-known for its hosting services, Bluehost decided to try its hand at creating a website builder.

Subject line: Bluehost’s new Website Builder makes building simple.

• Sells the benefits, not features: Focusing on the benefits makes the copy more compelling.
• Clean design: The simple design makes the email aesthetically pleasing and easy to read.
• Excellent targeting: Bluehost knows their audience is mainly made up of small business owners without technical expertise. The email uses language targeted at this demographic.

How to Automate Your Email Marketing

While the automation process varies from one ESP to another, there are some universal steps to automating your email marketing.

Define Your Segments

Effective email marketing campaigns start with list segmentation. Use the data you have about your subscribers to group them. This allows you to create more personalized campaigns.

Design an Efficient Workflow

After segmenting your email list, it’s time to design a workflow. This is the series of emails to fulfill the objective of the campaign.

Determine the Right Triggers

Once you’ve designed your workflow, determine the triggers that will set off the following email in the sequence. Examples of triggers can include customers opening your email, clicking on a link, or not opening it at all within a predetermined time frame.

Best Email Marketing Strategies

To succeed with email marketing, you have to be strategic in the way you design your campaigns. Here are some of the best email marketing strategies you can employ.

Use the Right List Building Strategies

The success of your email marketing campaigns depends on the quality of your email list. To build such a list, you must use list-building strategies designed to attract your target audience. For example, a case study promoted on LinkedIn may help a B2B brand build a list of engaged subscribers but flop when used by a B2C brand.

Practice Good Email List Hygiene

Another essential email marketing strategy is practicing good email list hygiene. Cleaning out inactive subscribers and email addresses that are no longer in use will ensure you have a good sender reputation.

Keep Your List Warm

Regularly send emails to your list to keep your subscribers engaged (warm). However, sporadic emailing could result in subscribers forgetting who you are and lead to low conversion rates.

If some of your subscribers go cold, you can run a re-engagement campaign.

Focus on One Objective

Design each campaign and email to focus on one objective. Trying to kill two (or more) birds with one stone doesn’t work with email marketing. It only confuses your audience and reduces your conversion rates.

Define and Track the Right KPIs

Email marketing is more than sending your subscribers a couple of emails. It also entails tracking the performance of your campaigns. To do so, you must define and track the right key performance indicators (KPIs).

Top 7 Email Marketing Tools Every Marketer Should Know

To pull off a successful campaign, you need to leverage email marketing tools to optimize your processes. Here are the top seven you should know:

Email Service Providers (ESP)

One of the most critical email marketing tools you need is an ESP. Some top ESPs are:

• Constant Contact: This is best for e-commerce email marketing campaigns, thanks to features like automated product recommendations and shoppable emails. Plans start at $20/month.
• Sendinblue: Sendinblue is best for small businesses running simple email campaigns. It has a rich feature set with a CRM, live chat, and SMS, among others. Plans start at $25/month.
• Pardot: B2B email campaigns require a platform specifically designed for the B2B buyer journey. Pardot fits the bill perfectly. However, to build high-growth email campaigns with Pardot, be prepared to part with at least $1,250/month.

Deliverability Tools

Email deliverability refers to the ability of an ESP to place emails in your receivers’ inboxes successfully. The wise email marketer will have an email deliverability tester in their toolbox. Here are some of the top ones:

• MailGenius: MailGenius inspects your emails for possible spam triggers. You can use it to run deliverability tests to ensure your emails reach their intended recipients’ inboxes. MailGenius is a free tool.
• GlockApps: GlockApps shows your delivery results in real-time, including whether your email landed in the Inbox, Spam folder, Gmail’s Promotional or Social tabs, or if it was never delivered at all. Personal accounts are free, and prices go up from there.

Testing and Tracking

Testing and tracking the campaign performance helps you create optimized iterations of your campaigns. Which email marketing tools are best for testing and tracking?

• Litmus: You can use Litmus to test and track your emails in traditional web clients and popular mobile devices.

Email Personalization Tools

Take your personalization game beyond just using your recipients’ name by using a personalization tool.

• Hyperise: When it comes to personalizing email marketing campaigns, no tool does it better than Hyperise. It helps you add dynamic, personalized images to each of your emails, including profile images from social media platforms.

email marketing strategy

When you follow these email marketing strategies, email will become your most important channel too!

Let’s get started.

1. Personalize your messages

When we say personalized email marketing, we don’t mean that you send an individual email to every single subscriber. Personalization means that you use customer data to create a personalized message.

A great example of a company that does personalization well is Amazon.

All of Amazon’s emails are personalized.

It’s not “Dear valued customer”, but “Dear Steven”.

It’s not, “You might like these… (randomly generated)”, but “You might like these (based on my purchase history)”.

To Amazon, email marketing is not just another marketing channel. It’s key to of the overall customer experience.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO is an email mastermind. Jeff Bezos understands the value of emails and has been known to read through customer complaints. It’s also why more than 35% of all product sales come from recommendations (both via email and on screen).

And it’s not just Amazon that have seen these kinds of results through personalization.

A study by Experian found that personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates!

Let’s break this down into numbers we can all understand:

Back in 2019, a research found that email marketing generates $0.08 in revenue per email.

That may not sound like much…

But if you send out an email campaign to 500,000 subscribers, you can generate up to $40,000 in revenue.

That’s a lot of additional revenue!

But, if you use personalization in your emails, you can expect a lot more!

According to new research,

Personalization can generate $20 in ROI for every $1 invested.

How’s that for a revenue opportunity?

The best part is this:

70% of brands do not use personalization within their email marketing strategy.

This means that by personalizing your emails, you stand out against the competition.

The simplest form of personalization is to address the reader by name. Most email service providers (ESP) offer this within their functionality and this tactic alone will improve your campaign performance.

For example, email subject lines that are personalized with a recipient’s first name can increase open rates by 16% higher open rates.

Considering that 47% of all emails are opened because of subject line alone, that’s a sure fire way to get more eyeballs on your email.

Outside of using the customer’s name, here are a few more tips to help you get started with personalization:

• Ask for the right information upfront: Great personalization starts way before you hit the ‘send’ button. It all starts with your sign up form. Without data such as name, company and location, you will be very limited with your personalized communication. Remember to only ask for the information you need, rather than the information you want. This is one of the ways that GDPR has impacted marketing teams.
• Use a real reply-to email address: When you use donotreply@example.com, it takes away the authenticity from the messaging. You want your readers to engage and respond to your campaigns. Use a real reply address will improve credibility and appear more personal.
• Use your real email signature: Just like using a real reply-to email address, you want to use real contact information within the email and the best way to do that is to include your contact details in the email signature. Giving your readers the opportunity to contact you or connect with you online is a great way to be personal and build a relationship with them.

2. Segment your subscribers

According to email marketers, segmentation is second on the top initiatives list this year.

Do you know why it is so high?

It’s because when you segment your database, your email campaigns become much more targeted to your audience.

Let’s take a look at an example:

You’re hosting a networking event for small business owners located within a 20 mile radius.

How can you expect to get the best turn out for your event?

The answer is segmentation.

The best way to get small business owners to turn up to your event would be to create a segment of people who list themselves as a small business owner that lives within 20 miles of your event and then send them an invite by email.

The segmentation part is simple and can easily be done through CRM software.

Compare this to sending one email to your entire database, with subscribers spread across the country (or continent).

How annoying is it to receive an email that invites you to an event that is located on other side of the world?

It’s very annoying!

Before you start segmenting your database, let’s take a look at how valuable it can be.

A recent study found that all email marketing KPIs perform better when you segment your email list.

The segmentation results include increased performance in:

If you segment your lists, you get better open rates, revenue, leads, transactions and more customers.

Another benefit is that segmentation goes hand in hand with GDPR and email marketing.

But, does it really work?

Yes!

Here’s an example from our own email marketing campaigns:

We recently sent out two email marketing campaigns. Both campaigns had the same subject line and the same content.

The first campaign was sent to our non-segmented email list, while the second was sent to our segmented list (segmented by interest).

The first non-segmented email earned an impressive 42 % open rate and a 4.5% click-through rate.

However, the segmented email campaign earned a 94% open rate and a 38% click-through rate!

I’d say it’s pretty valuable, wouldn’t you?

And that’s why so many marketers’ are segmenting their emails, right?

Wrong.

As 9 out of 10 email marketers’ do not segment their database.

So, here are a few examples for you to get started with segmentation:

• Segment by industry: Do you offer services and products to businesses or consumers? Knowing the industry of your subscribers is a great way to segment your email campaigns. For example, a business that sells car parts would engage at a much higher rate if they receive email campaigns on car products, compared to a business that sells software.
• Segment by company size: Also known as account-based marketing, segmenting email campaigns by company size or annual revenue is a great way to increase response rates. A small business that employs 5 people is not likely ready for the biggest industry conference of the year, whereas a business that employs 750 people might be a better fit.
• Segment by sales cycle: Early stage buyers will not be ready for an aggressive sales pitch or one-to-one demo but, they will be more appreciative to receive an industry research white paper. On the other end of the cycle, buyers who are ready to buy will respond well to product webinars or free trial offers.

3. Send mobile friendly emails

In 2012, 27% of all marketing emails were opened on a mobile device.

By 2014, that number jumped up to 42%.

Now, it’s as high as 61%!

These are huge numbers!

And what do you do as soon as you wake up in the morning?

If you’re like me, I’m guessing you have your phone next to your bed and the first thing you do each morning is check your phone for calls, messages and yes, you guessed it, emails…

Don’t worry, you’re not the only one. 50% of us do this.

When you send an email to a subscriber who reads their emails on their mobile device, but the email is not optimized for that device, what do you think they do with?

Mostly, they will unsubscribe or delete it.

So why is it that almost half of all emails are still not mobile friendly?

Worse still, our own email marketing research found that 20% of email campaigns are not optimized for mobile.

Yet on the opposite end of the scale, and when email campaigns are optimized for mobile, they generate a lot of revenue!

The average revenue per mobile email is $0.40, which is more than 4x that of a desktop email click, according to Yesmail.

Revenue per email on mobile devices is 4X higher than desktop

And 55% of smartphone users have made at least one purchase after receiving a mobile promotional email.

Furthermore, a study by Flexmail found that 36% of B2B companies that have optimized their email campaigns for mobile devices saw an overall improvement to their email performance.

So, how do you optimize your campaigns for mobile devices?

Don’t worry, here are some tips on how to do that.

• Implement responsive email design (RED): Creating a responsive email design means that the user experience is optimized regardless of the device or screen they use. Most email service providers (ESP) offer this solution within their email functionality.
• Keep the subject line and pre-header short: The subject line is crucial. Keep it short so the reader knows exactly what the email topic is about. And the pre-header text (also known as snippet text), don’t let it go to waste by using “To view this email in your browser…”. Instead, summarize the email or include a call to action (i.e., Use “FREESHIP” to get free shipping).
• Make the CTA big and obvious: Mobile device vary in size. While a text link may work on a tablet or larger screen, you might be alienating your readers who have a smaller screen (or bigger hands!) if your call to action is too small. Make the call to action, big, bold and simple to click.

4. Test copy, design and buttons

Whether you test your home page, landing pages or email templates, testing provides us with data to make practical decisions that will improve our marketing performance.

And email marketing is no different.

Most marketers have A/B tested their email campaigns.

If I had to guess, I’d say you’ve tested your email subject line, right?

Even the former President of the United States has A/B tested his email subject lines….

Think I’m kidding?

Email marketing played a huge part in the success of Obama’s 2012 Presidential campaign.

By sending several variations made to the subject line to a small sample of subscribers, they were able to calculate the amount in donations they could expect to receive based on the results.

The sample size revealed that the poorest performing subject line (“The one thing the polls got right..”), when sent to the entire database, would generate $403,603 in donations.

The best performing subject line (“I will be outspent”) was expected to generate $2,540,866 in donations.

That’s a huge difference!

In fact, the best performing subject line outperformed expectations and generated a total of $2,673,278.

That’s an additional $2.2 million in donations raised due to a change in the emails subject line!

President Barack Obama raised an additional $2 million in donations by split testing his email subject line

But it’s not only subject lines you can test through email marketing.

You can also test:

• From address: The name that appears in the “from” field has a huge impact on whether the reader opens your email. In fact, the sender name is the main reason why people open your email. Test your from address by sending your campaigns from a person’s name, person + company or from your CEO.
• Plain text vs HTML campaigns: Like most marketers’, I’m sure you are already sending a plain text version of your email. However, have you thought of testing an email campaign that is plain text only? And when you add an element of personalization, plain text emails appear to be written just for the reader.
• Long vs short emails: You can keep your emails short and sweet or, you can create long detailed emails. Long form emails can include more detailed copy whereas shorter emails will send the reader directly to a targeted landing page. The best way to see what works best? Test it.

(Not sure how to design your email campaigns? We’ve collected 21 of the best B2B email marketing examples from the world’s leading SaaS companies.)

5. Automate email campaigns when possible

Trigger-based emails are emails that are sent out automatically based on user behavior.

The most common forms of trigger emails are ‘welcome’ emails, ‘thank you’ emails and ‘transactional’ emails, such as order confirmation email and email receipts.

The data behind trigger emails shows us that trigger emails perform much better than traditional email.

For example, Epsilon found that:

• Open rates for trigger emails are as high as 49% (95% higher than traditional email open rates)
• The average click-through rate (CTR) for trigger emails is more than double the rate compared to traditional email click-through rates
• The best converting websites in the world, sites that convert as much as 40% of their traffic, use trigger emails.

And not only that. According to the recent Blueshift Report, trigger-based marketing emails are 497% more effective than batch and blast emails.

Does this sound too good to be true?

Well, it’s not. We’ve tested it. And it works!

Below is a comparison for our traditional email campaign (left) against our triggered email campaign (right):

Our triggered emails generated 5x higher open rates and 15x higher click-through rates.

Today, only 20% of marketers currently use triggered emails and they make up a low percentage of overall email volume, at around 2.6%. However, they can be responsible for as much as 20% of your email marketing revenue!

Triggered emails perform really well because they hit the email marketing sweet spot.

What does the email marketing sweet spot look like, you ask?

It looks like this:

And the reason why they perform so well is because of context.

Consider the following scenario;

You visit a website, browse the product line and add items to your shopping cart but, you begin to have doubts and decide to leave before completing a purchase.

Sound familiar?

This happens to every single eCommerce store, every single day.

But what if, one hour later, you receive an email that includes the exact product you were shopping for?

And what if this email included not only a quick-link back to your shopping cart but, a free shipping code or 10% discount?

You’re now more likely to complete your purchase, aren’t you?

That’s the power of trigger emails.

But setting up triggered emails is expensive and complex, isn’t it?

It doesn’t have to be. You can start by using auto-responders in your customer service software to replicate the automation aspect. That’s what we do for all of our existing triggered emails and we’re happy with it.

Here are some examples of trigger mails you can send;

• Activation: A new user creates an account but, they do not use your product within the first 7 days. Create an  “activation” campaign that sends an automated email with their login information, steps on how they can get started and include a video demonstration for additional support. You can also invite them to a one-on-one meeting to walk them through the product and answer any questions they may have.
• Win-back: An existing customer is soon approaching the end of his yearly subscription. The customer hasn’t used your product in 3 months and you need a way to win them back and keep them for another year. Create a “win back” email that sends an automated email to all customers that are coming to end of their contract with a list of new product features and a short plan on expected releases in the next six months.
• Surprise: Customer loyalty is the key to success. And you can reward your loyal customers by giving them something for free every now and then. Create a “surprise” email that sends an automated email to your best customers that offers a free yearly license to your software for them to use, a gift card or even a coupon code to redeem a box of cupcakes. It’s a small cost for your business but, the reward is huge!

Conclusion

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