We know from our client experience that well planned email marketing campaigns deliver real results and this isn’t surprising when you consider how much cheaper, more measurable and better targeted email marketing campaigns can be than any other marketing solution. However like most things email marketing is only as successful as the planning that you’ve made on your email marketing campaigns, don’t fall into the trap that just because you’re sending out emails doesn’t necessarily mean that you are making the most of the growth opportunities for your business.
So these are our four steps to successful email marketing campaign planning.
Step one – who are you targeting?
For any form of marketing the first step has to be to know your audience and who is the intended receiver of your message? If you can clearly identify who you are targeting then you will be able to have an email that directly targets this audience and works to engage with them on what they want to see/hear. Don’t be afraid to have different versions of your email for different sectors, for example if you wholesaled products why would you send the same copy to a small retailer and a Europe wide chain?
The key here is segmenting your data, in the simplest form this can be customers and prospects but you can go deeper, how about customers that order every month and customers that order every year – whatever you choose the better you can target your audience the better the likely success of your email marketing campaigns.
Step two – what do you want the result to be?
There is no point in doing something if you have been unable to identify what you want the result to be, is it brand awareness, is it click throughs to a seminar maybe – how can you get past this stage if you don’t know what success looks like?
Step three – only use quality content
A common mistake we see is businesses pushing out content they want to tell, instead ask yourself what do your customers want to read – if you think about this from a customers perspective you are far more likely to achieve a strong open and engagement rate.
Step four – measure you success
Through life we surely are all looking to improve what we do and how we work, so why are any of your email marketing campaigns any different? If you aren’t reviewing and measuring the success of these email marketing campaigns then we think that you are missing a big opportunity for improvement.
So what matrices should you be measuring?
Open rates – this simply looks at the total number of emails that have been opened and is a great indicator of how much of that above the line copy is working, as well of course as the quality of your email lists.
Open rate looks at how many of the total number of emails you have sent, have been opened by the recipient. This metric is a great indicator of how well your subject line is working and can offer insight into how your brand is perceived by your customers; however, the open rate does not tell the whole story – just because a lot of people opened an email does not make it successful. They could have opened the email without taking the appropriate action – clicking on a link, for example.
Click throughs – this simply refers to the number of recipients who have clicked on link in your campaign, with mailPDQ you can tell which links are the most popular and who from your lists clicked on what link – surely a real benefit for any follow ups?
So I’m summary for any email marketing campaigns your business needs to plan effectively and if you do you will gain a real measurable success which is surely what its all about isn’t it?
And now the sales bit, if you or your business needs help of even just a free email marketing consultation then please don’t to get in touch through the website here.
