It should be exciting. You’ve got a pristine free email marketing template and you can do anything that will increase your ROI over the previous ones. Why is it so daunting?
The number of stages to planning an email marketing campaign is a purely personal decision. Just work your way through the planning process, numbering each stage, and in later campaigns modify it as experience mounts. It’ll take more than one campaign of course.
Let’s start with the initial stages, with my choice of starting point.
1. Purpose
There is a lot of argument about what should be the prime consideration and much depends on your particular circumstances. You might be after clearing your shelves, selling virtual seats for a webinar, encouraging those whose position in the life-cycle of a subscriber suggests they are under-purchasing, or just selling something.
Once you have decided on the Purpose, every other decision is based on it and limited by it.
2. Who
Once we are aware of the Purpose of an email marketing campaign, we can move on to the group we are targeting. It’s not often a good option to pick everyone. This would make targeting all but impossible, and probably too much bother, but there are some circumstances, for instance where you have a small or specific email marketing list, where you might.
If you are selling a range of holidays, those who go for all-in luxury cruises along the Med might not be too receptive to a safari under canvas. It’s up to you to judge who wants to go where. Don’t believe those who say it’s easy.
In essence, it comes down to what metrics to choose. There will be those for whom the product appears custom-made but that doesn’t mean one should exclude everyone else as there’s always a chance some might fancy something different. But exercise care. You can only send so many emails and one that's unlikely to be completed is a wasted slot.
3. Work out what they want
Metrics only go so far in defining a subscriber. It’s like looking at a photograph of a person: it has enough information for you to describe them, and possibly recognise them. A video, on the other hand, tells you where they are going, and by extrapolation, where they’ve been. It’s this type of information allows us to fine tune the email.
For instance, the person might have been in a particular position in their company for a few years. Another person, whose metrics are more or less the same, might be on the way up, and there’s the third for whom a sideways move is all they can hope for. Each one might find a use for your product. Each one would have different triggers despite seeming, outwardly all but identical.
That’s just the first three factors in planning your next email marketing campaign. Breaking it down into easily considered sections makes starting so much easier and, in larger companies, allows various members of staff to work on a specific task. We’ll go further in later articles.
