Whether it’s for work, pleasure, or both, people spend significant amounts of time in front of their computer screens. Since one of the top activities that make up this time is email related, it’s important for companies to integrate email into marketing campaigns along with direct mail, social, and mobile for an effective overall marketing plan.
Email marketing, however, can be a double-edged sword. Used effectively, it allows businesses to connect with customers and prospects easily and cost-effectively. Used carelessly, emails can dull your sales and marketing communications and even damage customer relationships and your reputation.
Not every campaign will be successful but if you and your team are good about analyzing results, admitting shortcomings and making changes, you’ll eventually see the results you’re looking for.
Here are a few tactics to keep in mind the next time you launch a campaign.
- Have A Plan. Nothing hurts an email campaign more than inconsistent messaging and lack of direction so it’s important that your sales and marketing message be aligned with your overall marketing strategy. Consider your objectives, plan your budget, and determine how you’re going to send and track the campaign.
- Have an end goal. Before you or your team deploys an email campaign, it’s important to decide what you consider success. This is also the time to decide if you’re going test the effectiveness of the campaign and what you’ll be testing for. Are you going to perform a complex multivariate test or an A/B split to test one landing page over another? Is this going to be a multi-channel campaign integrated with social media? These are just a few of the questions to answer prior to mapping out end goals.
- Be on target. Relevance is key. Email campaigns should always be written for your target audience. So if you’re targeting different decision makers in different industries, you’ll have to adapt your approach to meet the needs of your customer and prospect base segments. Each of your audience members speaks and responds to you differently based on the language, tone, and style you employ. Your email copy should be tailored to address these audience needs and to accommodate the viewer. Your email will be read on a mobile device by some percentage of recipients, so make sure it renders well.
- Communicate internally. You set goals before you deployed your email and one of them was getting people to open, click and take advantage of your offer. So now what? Well for starters it’s important to ensure your sales team is aware of the why and the when: why is the email being deployed and when is it deploying. This will lead to follow up being done in a timely fashion for any online or offline inquiries and avoid any embarrassing situations where someone in your company is not prepared to answer questions about your promotion.
- Evaluate and Revise. Make sure you evaluate the email in the larger scheme of your campaign. Was it successful? Did you meet your goals and objectives? Perhaps you need to refine your message next time around based on the lessons learned. Or maybe it was a huge success and the sales team knocked it out of the park. Celebrate for a minute and then plan your next move to keep your momentum.
By implementing a few simple tactics like planning, setting next steps, and knowing your analytics you have the recipe for an effective and measurable email marketing campaign.