Sometimes It's Good to Get Ahead of Yourself
The execution of a single effective email campaign, much less your entire email marketing strategy, requires some serious thought, planning, scheduling and tweaking. So, take some time to look ahead and develop an email marketing plan to keep you focused and on track to meet your goals.
What are your goals?
New customer acquisition, customer retention, stronger relationships, repeat sales? Are you providing helpful information or trying to prompt a particular response? If your answer is all of the above, you should have separate plans to help you reach each goal, simply because your audience and your message will be different for each one.
Your audience
You may want to use a rented opt-in list for new customer acquisition, while using your in-house list for retention. Make sure you know and understand each audience to maximize the effectiveness of your email campaigns. Who are your most important customers or clients, and why? What motivates them? What do they want or expect from you? Who are your most important prospects, and why? What is important to them?
Your message
Think about what kinds of campaigns you may use. You have many options including newsletters, holiday or seasonal promotions, preferred customer sales, new product or service announcements, press releases, general business communications and more. See Hints & Tips Volume 1 Issue 8 for more details.
How do you spell success?
How many sales or leads do you expect to generate? How many visits to your retail store, phone calls to your office, or new subscribers to your newsletter will make your campaign a winner? Evaluate results including open rates, click-throughs, and unsubscribes. Then, use that information to improve your next campaign. Even if your campaign is purely informational, you can measure your success the old-fashioned way: via subscriber feedback. Take it from me, your subscribers will tell you what they think!
Test, Test, Test
There are many variables including your list, your subject line, your email copy, your offer, your campaign type, delivery day/time and more. Testing the subject line is both the logical first step and, conveniently, the easiest variable to test, so why not start there? Just remember to test by changing only one variable at a time.
What does your schedule look like?
Take a look at your calendar to decide what information to communicate and when. Consider upcoming seasons (back-to-school, tax season), holidays and events as email marketing opportunities. You may even be launching a direct mail campaign, a newspaper ad or flyer distribution that could be complimented by email marketing to make your overall campaign more powerful and profitable.Your schedule may change, but your plan will give you a strong foundation. Be realistic in estimating how much time you will need to execute your plan.
A word of caution: be sure to follow through on the promises you make to your subscribers. A "monthly" newsletter should always remain on schedule unless you communicate a change in frequency.
How Much Communication is Too Much?
This is a tough one because all audiences and businesses are different. A stock broker may send an email to his client base every trading day, while an appliance store may communicate much less frequently. Think about your product or service and how often your customers use it or buy it to determine how often to communicate. Beyond that, let your click throughs, unsubscribe rates and customer feedback be your guide.
