As the new year approaches, it’s the perfect time to start thinking about what you want to accomplish going forward. Setting goals is more than just listing wishes — it gives you concrete objectives to focus your efforts toward.
If you’re using email marketing campaigns to promote your business, your goals will guide your decision-making through every step of the process.
Not sure where to start when it comes to setting email marketing goals? Use this guide to set smart goals for email marketing and take your campaigns to the next level.
Email marketing goals and objectives
Setting goals is essential to any marketing campaign, including email marketing. But maybe you’re not convinced. Learn more about the importance of email marketing goals and objectives.
Why do you need to set email marketing goals?
If you try to build an email marketing campaign without clear goals, your decisions will be disjointed and likely counterproductive. You need to know what you’re working toward to develop and execute an effective email marketing strategy.
By setting goals, you can prioritize the things that are most important to your business. You’ll be able to refer back to those goals every time you need to make a decision so you can choose the option that best supports your objectives.
Think of your goals as the rudder that keeps your email marketing campaign ship going in the right direction. Without those goals, you’d be lost at sea, headed nowhere.
Your goals also give you a way to evaluate your campaigns’ performance. Otherwise, how will you know whether they are successful? You’d be looking at the results of your campaign without any clear way to gauge their contribution to your broader business objectives.
Email marketing goals by industry
Your goals for email marketing often depend on the industry you’re in. For example, non-profit and charity organizations typically have goals related to fundraising or engaging donors. Retail businesses, by contrast, will probably have email marketing goals related to product sales.
Consider these example email marketing goals across industries:
- Real estate: Increasing referrals, boosting brand awareness, generating and nurturing leads
- Education: Building audience trust, boosting enrollment
- Healthcare: Improving patient engagement, acquiring new patients, strengthening relationships
- Non-profit organizations: Increasing donations, attracting volunteers, encouraging repeat donations
- Retail: Improving customer loyalty, increasing revenue
- Food and beverage: Driving sales, gaining a competitive edge, strengthening branding
- Events: Boosting enrollment, improving attendee engagement, growing leads
Tailor your goals to objectives that are relevant to your business and industry. Other businesses or organizations may have very different goals for their email campaigns, and that’s okay. Focus on what you want to achieve and how you can reach those goals through email marketing.
Setting goals for email marketing
Before you do anything else for your email campaigns, take some time to set your goals. You may need to collaborate with other team members to get their input on what your goals should be.
Aligning your business objectives with your email marketing strategy
Your email marketing goals shouldn’t come out of nowhere. Instead, they should directly align with and support your broader business objectives.
For example, one of your business objectives for the next year could be increasing revenue by 10%. In that case, your email marketing campaigns’ goals should tie into boosting revenue.
Your campaign goals could be improving customer acquisition, reducing churn rates, or increasing cross-selling and up-selling, to name a few examples. Reaching any of those campaign goals helps you get closer to your big-picture objective of increasing revenue.
SMART goal framework
Some goals are more useful than others. The SMART framework is a tool for setting intelligent, meaningful goals for your business. SMART is an acronym that stands for the following.
- Specific: Vague goals are ineffective goals. Make sure your goal is specific about what you want to accomplish and the steps you need to take to get there.
- Measurable: Strong goals are also measurable. They involve a quantifiable component that answers questions like, “By how much?” or “How many?”
- Achievable: Shooting for the stars isn’t the best advice when setting goals for your email marketing campaigns. Choose goals that you reasonably believe you and your team can achieve.
- Relevant: For your goal to have a tangible impact on your business, it needs to be relevant to the big picture of what you’re trying to achieve. Relevance is all about tying your campaign goals into your broader business objectives.
- Time-bound: How long will it take to achieve this goal? Include a time parameter so everyone knows the timeframe you’re working with.
An example of a SMART goal for an email marketing campaign would be to “Increase traffic on our website by 25% by the end of the first quarter. The website is one of our primary conversion points for sales, so boosting traffic will ultimately grow revenue.”
4 steps to set your email marketing goals
Many people don’t consider goal-setting a process, but it can be. If you’re struggling to develop practical goals for your email marketing campaigns, follow these steps.
1. Consider your business objectives
Step one in setting goals for any marketing campaign is thinking about your business objectives. Consider your company’s big-picture aims in the short- and long-term and how email marketing can help you achieve those aims. If you don’t already have clear business objectives, now is the time to sit down with your team and develop them.
2. List out specific goals that will get you closer to your business objectives
Once you have your business objectives in mind, start listing email marketing targets that could get you closer to them. For example, if your broader objective is growing your sales, your campaign targets could be improving customer retention, increasing the value per transaction, or acquiring new customers.
List any goal you could achieve through email marketing that would help you reach your business objectives. You’re brainstorming potential goals in this step, not committing to anything, so get creative and don’t exclude anything.
3. Narrow down to one or two main goals
This next step is when you start narrowing down your goals for each specific campaign. As tempting as it is to try to accomplish 20 different things with each campaign, that’s simply not realistic. A better approach is to prioritize one or two concrete goals for each email campaign so you can focus your energy effectively.
Choose a goal or two that best supports your business objectives. If you choose two, make sure they go together well. For example, improving customer retention and increasing engagement both involve strengthening customer relationships. They’d be much better goals for a campaign than driving web traffic and gathering customer feedback since those two don’t have much in common.
You can always run a separate campaign later to focus on some of the other goals on your list.
4. Select metrics for success
A crucial element of setting goals for your campaign is deciding how you will measure your success toward those goals. You need to find a way to make all your goals qualitative — something you can measure in concrete numbers.
Say your goal is to boost customer engagement through email marketing. How will you know whether you have achieved that goal? You need to set clear metrics and benchmarks for measuring customer engagement.
For example, you might measure engagement through your conversion rate — the percentage of your email recipients who take a specified action, like purchasing a product. You could also measure engagement through your likes and followers on your social media pages. These are two completely different approaches to evaluating progress toward the same goal.
The metrics you choose to measure your success are just as important as the goals themselves. Make sure your metrics accurately measure what you’re trying to achieve and reflect what’s most important to your business. If interaction on social media is not a priority for your company, for instance, that would be a poor metric to measure engagement.
3 email marketing goals to set for the new year
There’s no end to the different goals you can set for email marketing campaigns. To help get you started, consider these three sample goals you may want to establish this new year.
Increase brand awareness
People can only become customers if they know about your business. That’s why building brand awareness is such a common marketing goal, especially for email campaigns.
But strong brand awareness is about more than just a surface-level familiarity with your company — it’s about being a recognizable, known entity in your industry. Think of examples like Coca-Cola and Adidas in their respective categories.
While email marketing might not take you to those levels, it can boost your brand awareness with customers. You can build better brand loyalty and an edge over your competitors from there.
Improve engagement
More engaged customers are more likely to purchase from your business again and recommend your brand to other people. In other words, engagement is incredibly valuable. It’s no surprise so many email campaigns focus on improving customer engagement.
If your goal is better engagement, consider segmenting your email list into smaller groups with shared characteristics. That way, you can better personalize your messaging and engage these customers directly.
Drive website traffic
A business website is essential, but it’s only useful if customers actually see it. An email campaign is a great way to drive traffic to pages on your website, whether product pages, blog posts, or simply your homepage. Draw the readers in with engaging email content, then direct them to your website for more.
How to gauge the success of your email marketing campaign
Once your email marketing campaign ends, it’s time to reflect and evaluate how well the campaign performed. Look back at the goals you set and the metrics you selected to measure progress toward those goals. Check to see whether those metrics improved during and after the campaign.
One of the benefits of digital marketing channels like email marketing is that you have access to a lot of data to help you understand your campaigns. With the right email marketing software, you’ll be able to see metrics about every aspect of your campaign, from open rates and click-through rates to conversions and sales.
Find the data related to the metrics you chose to measure your goals. For example, if you chose the click-through rate to measure engagement, you would review the data about your click-through rate and check whether you hit your benchmark for success.
Examine metrics individually and as part of a bigger picture. The better you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your campaigns, the more you can improve the next one.
Learn more: Email Marketing Metrics: Measuring Success Beyond Open Rate
Email marketing tools
Email marketing tools enhance each step of the campaign process, from design to evaluation. Some tools like Constant Contact include AI marketing features to help draft your messages and build campaigns, templates for a convenient and quick design process, and comprehensive tracking so you always know what’s happening with your campaigns.
Choosing an email marketing software — what to look for
There are so many different email marketing software options out there that it can be challenging to select the right one for your business. As you evaluate your choices, consider factors such as:
- Contact threshold: Tools typically limit how many emails you can create and send depending on your plan. A higher contact threshold means the tool can accommodate a larger email list.
- Design capabilities: Some tools help you design your messages with customizable templates, and others don’t. Choose software depending on whether this is an important capability for your business.
- Tracking tools: Your email marketing software should monitor the results of your campaign and report them with easy-to-understand tracking tools.
- Integrations: Ideally, the tool you select will integrate with other software your business uses, like your customer relationship management (CRM) tool.
Go(al) forth and prosper!
Being excited about your email campaigns and wanting to get started right away is entirely understandable. Just don’t put the cart before the horse by neglecting to set clear goals first.
Setting SMART goals for your email campaigns will keep you on track throughout the whole campaign process and give you a way to evaluate your success. Choose measurable metrics that go with each goal. And if those metrics indicate that you didn’t reach your goals on the first campaign, don’t worry. You can learn from it and tweak your approach for better results in the next campaign.
