How to Create an Email Campaign in 5 Steps

Looking for a new way to connect with your customers? Try sending a marketing email. Email is 40 times more effective for acquiring customers than Facebook or Twitter. Squarespace’s Email Campaigns makes it easy for you to create, design, and send best-in-class content to your entire mailing list. Read on to learn how to create your first email campaign and raise brand awareness with your email marketing strategy.

1. Determine what type of email you want to send

First, decide what you’d like to say and accomplish with your email marketing campaign. Perhaps you want to promote a sale or send a thank you note to your most loyal customers. 

Common email campaigns include:

• Transactional emails: This category includes welcome emails after joining an email list and confirmation emails sent after a purchase. 

• Promotional emails: These are usually messages promoting a discount or a new product to email subscribers, but can also be used to promote events or other releases.

The examples above are common for ecommerce businesses, but you don’t have to be selling products to send an email campaign. If you’re a writer, for example, you can start an email newsletter to let your audience know about new blog posts or projects. 

With Squarespace Email Campaigns, click “Create” to choose whether you’d like to send a “blast email,” which are individual campaigns that you can send to an email list or create an “automated email,” which are email campaigns you can set up to send after a person performs a specific action on your website.

2. Start creating your first email

Once you’ve found the layout that works best for you, it’s time to start adding your email content. In Squarespace Email Campaigns, browse the layouts to see which email design best suits your message. You can also build your own layout by choosing “Start Blank.”  

Email Campaigns allows you to customize an email template and upload images from your Squarespace account so that your design is consistent with your brand. You can repurpose existing images and descriptions from your website, or you can start fresh. 

Then, write some email copy to make sure your message stands out. Spend some time thinking about your copy header and subject line, too. Creative, intriguing, or funny email subject lines and copy will stand out in crowded inboxes and give you a better:

• Open rate: The number of people who open your email 

• Click-through rate: The number of people who click on the call to action (CTA) in your email

• Unsubscribe rate: The number of people who continue to opt-in for your digital marketing

• Conversion rate: The number of people who become a customer or take some other important action after clicking through your email

All of the above are metrics you can use to measure whether you’ve run a successful email marketing campaign. Stay away from subject lines that might sound spammy, however, because they risk being marked as junk mail, which could mess with your email deliverability.

When designing your email, make sure that it will also look good on mobile devices. You can send yourself a test email to check how it looks on your own device and optimize images or copy length if needed. 

Get help drafting your email copy with AI tools

3. Choose your audience

To build your first email list, you can add your subscriber list manually, import a mailing list from another service, or add a subscription form to your website so fans of your brand can sign up. If you have a social media presence, consider sharing a sign-up link for your followers on those channels. 

Once you have your full email list, decide on the target audience for your email campaign. A general update or product promotion might go to your entire mailing list. But if you’re setting up an email marketing automation or sending a follow-up email to people who attended an event you hosted, for example, you’ll want to focus on a specific set of subscribers.

Make sure you’ve set up your sender details (and verified your domain) so none of your emails get caught in a spam folder. 

4. Use Squarespace Analytics to track your success

Once you’ve sent your first marketing email, you’ll be able to track your campaign performance. With Squarespace, you can find metrics in the Email Campaigns Dashboard. If you are on a Basic or Advanced Commerce plan, you can also see the sales resulting from an email campaign in the “Traffic Sources” panel in Analytics. 

Use your analytics to keep track of the performance of your different email campaigns over time. Eventually you’ll be able to compare data like conversions and open rates to see whether you have an effective email marketing strategy. If you’re falling short of your email marketing goals, you can make adjustments to your next campaign.

5. Start planning your next email campaign

Now that you’re an email marketing pro, it’s time to start getting ready for your next campaign. You already know how impactful email marketing can be and how email marketing tools can make it easy to create a beautiful and effective campaign. 

Simply repeat the steps above to test and learn your new marketing technique, whether you’re sharing a blog post, sending an event invitation, or announcing a sale on your products or services.

Watch our webinar to learn more about growing your brand audience.

This post was updated on December 19, 2022.