The presidential candidates shouldn’t be the only ones campaigning year, your company should be too! Current studies have shown that email marketing is the second highest effective tool in gaining conversions; the first highest being Search Engine Optimization. Email Marketing is cost effective, and the size of your company does not play a huge role in creating a successful marketing plan. If it is so great, then why isn’t every company doing it? Well, that is because it does take some time to plan out and create content for email marketing.
Now where do you start in the planning process? The beginning of course– you need to define your target audience. You need to determine who you are going to send your emails to before you figure out what needs to go in them. If you have more than one target audience, it is okay to create separate groups. You may want some emails to be sent to everyone, but sometimes you do need to specialize it a little more.
After you select your audience, you’re going to want to focus on your purpose. Traveling on a path that leads to no where will waste both company time and money. Think about these questions when defining your purpose: what do my readers want to know about, what information do they find useful, and what do I want to accomplish with my email marketing? This will help you in creating campaigns for: newsletters, holiday or seasonal promotions, customer sales, product announcements, industry information, and things going on within your company. Treat your subscribers like VIP’s. They are interested in your company, and want to hear about important and interesting news, so do just that! Give them special inside information that the average joe won’t know. They will value that and your company, as long as you keep it: useful, short, and show your personality.
Last, but certainly not least, develop your plan! You can to do this in three simple steps: 1. outline your goals, 2. decide on your frequency, and 3. schedule a timeline. Determine what goals you have for each list, and how you plan on achieving it. Remember to have measurable goals to base your progress on when creating your outline. Think about your audience as well as your company, and what frequency makes sense. Base your frequency on your message. If you are just sending out a newsletter, then once a month is perfectly fine. If you have new product releases every two weeks, then send out an email every two weeks before they release to give your readers a sneak peak. If you have specials every Monday, then maybe sending out an email every Friday talking about the upcoming specials isn’t a bad idea. The last thing is to schedule a timeline. Think about everything mentioned above, and create a logical timeline for when emails should be sent out. If you get ahead on your work, you can create your campaigns and schedule when you want them to go out in advance and focus on other projects.
A timeline is the last step in planning your email marketing plan, but make sure you are constantly reviewing the success of each campaign to determine what is working and what isn’t. It is all about finding the right line between your readers forgetting about you and being considered spam.