Create targeted marketing campaigns

First, define a clear goal for your campaign. This goal acts as your compass and will help you better understand what success will look like after the message is sent.

At this stage in the marketing funnel, keep your focus on getting someone to buy. And perhaps more precisely, get someone to buy something specific (say, your newest product or best seller) and to do so right now.

Bonus tip: Keep your target audience top of mind when determining your goal. The content and call to action should directly pertain to them and speak to their past behavior or interests.

Next, determine where you are designing your campaign. Use all of the channels in your current toolkit strategically. You can create similar messages across each one, but target those who have specifically opted in for each.

For instance, we recommend the following strategy for channel targeting:

• Text or WhatsApp: This is the most direct channel to reach subscribers. If someone has opted in, send them campaigns here first.
• Email: Email has a wider reach than text, as more people are likely to give their email address rather than their phone number. Send emails to email subscribers who have not opted in for text.
• Social: Use social media to reinforce your messages in text and email. Otherwise, target anyone who has not subscribed to email or text with unique paid social ad campaigns.
  

An effective campaign often includes an incentive, particularly for first-time shoppers, to nudge them towards buying. Develop an incentive strategy that makes sense for your brand, as the amount you can rationally discount is often dependent on your current pricing and the type of items you sell.

That said, first-time shopper discounts tend to range between 10% and 20% off.

While percentage-off discounts are popular, your unique incentive strategy may incorporate a variety of approaches, including:

• Dollar-off discounts: Offer a fixed dollar amount off (e.g., "$10 off your first purchase"). This can be particularly effective for very high or low-priced items where a percentage off is either not enough or too much for your brand to afford.
• Free shipping: In some cases, the cost of shipping is a significant deterrent to completing an order. Free shipping, especially for first-time orders, can be a powerful motivator to shop.
• Bundled offers: Offer a specific discount or add-on incentive when someone buys multiple items rather than just 1.
• Gift with purchase: A small, complementary gift can create a delightful unboxing experience and encourage first-time shoppers to complete their order and even shop again.

The trick to writing high-converting campaign copy is to speak directly to the audience reading the message. Your copy should be clear, concise, compelling, and straight to the point: why they should buy.

More specifically, strong campaign copy will:

• Explain how the product shown, or your brand, solves the recipient’s problems.
• Showcase unique benefits that specifically set your brand apart from others.
• Offer a compelling value proposition of why buy now (e.g., limited time, while supplies last, or an incentive that will expire).
• Align with your brand's voice while using strong, persuasive language.

Start with a captivating headline (for email) or opening sentence (for text and social) that speaks directly to the reader’s needs. Elaborate on the value-add in the body copy. Then, conclude with a clear call to action (i.e., CTA) that spurs the reader to shop (e.g., Shop Now) and takes them directly to where they can do just that.

Beyond drafting the written copy for your campaign, you must also design a visually appealing message across channels, particularly for email and social media campaigns.

Follow these foundational design principles:

• Follow the “rule of thirds” (a design principle that divides a visual into a 3x3 grid, placing key elements along the gridlines or at intersections to draw the eye and enhance visual hierarchy).
• Keep your CTA (to shop) front and center in the message.
• Use a combination of images and copy, as visuals communicate your brand style and offer, while the copy delivers a clear message.
• Use high-quality images (72 dpi resolution is a general web best practice. For email, keep full-width images between 600 and 1000 px in width and less than 2000 px in height; images that are not full width can be smaller than 600 px).
• Consider adding movement (e.g., GIFs or video content) that draws the eye.
• Design for dark and light modes, testing to ensure the content appears as intended despite the viewers’ display settings.
• Design with mobile viewing in mind and test to ensure it appears as expected across devices.

Hitting send is not the end of your journey with this campaign. After sending, you should pay close attention to its performance, so you know whether or not your efforts were successful, how much you earned from this investment, and what elements did or did not work. That way, you can modify your strategy as needed for future sends.

In particular, you will want to monitor engagement (how people interact with the campaign message) as well as conversions (whether or not someone actually completes the call-to-action and buys).

More specifically, focus on the following core metrics for each category:

• Engagement: Impressions, clicks, opens (for email), website traffic
• Conversions: Conversion rate, attributed revenue, placed orders, new subscribers

Where you monitor engagement and conversions really depends on what type of campaign you are sending. For instance:

• For email or text messages: You can build reports and view pre-created analytics dashboards in Klaviyo. Learn how to use Klaviyo reporting. ‍
• For social media: Head to the help documentation for the tool you are using to better understand its analytics capabilities. For instance, here is information for reporting in Meta Ads or Google Ads.‍
• General site traffic: You may invest in other tools to support your campaign analysis outside of the actual service provider. For instance, you may use Google Analytics to monitor web traffic and conversions over a set period of time.

Bonus tip: Use UTM parameters in your campaign URLs to track the source, medium, and campaign that brought traffic to your site so you can better monitor the success of individual links in your message.