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Email marketing: you must have a plan
You only need to look at your inbox to see how popular email marketing has become. This is because it’s a relatively cost-effective way of distributing marketing messages.
Now take a closer look at all the emails you receive, especially all the ones that end up in deleted items. You’ll see the majority are really poorly executed. So how do you make sure your email campaign doesn’t become one of them?
Here, in the first of a series of blogs, I’ll talk about the stages you need to go through to make sure your emails are the ones that get read.
Planning
The planning stage is the most critical part of any marketing campaign. It ensures you’ve thought about all the elements you need to make your campaign a success.
In terms of email marketing, before you even start to thinking about what your email looks like, you need to ask yourself five key questions:
- What do you want to say?
- Who is going to read it?
- What will they get from what they read?
- What do they do after they’ve read it?
- What do you do in response?
Having the answers to these questions will allow you to formulate an effective email marketing plan. So let’s think about each one in more detail:
What do you want to say?
Marketing emails aren’t the place to write a novel, so what are the key messages you need to get across? There’s also a killer question to ask: is email the best way to get these messages across?
Who is going to read it?
Knowing who your audience is will help you build the right mailing list and tailor your message to their needs. This is really important because sending the wrong content to the wrong people will only alienate.
What will they get from what they read?
Let’s be realistic, your audience isn’t waiting with bated breath for your email. You need to find a way of grabbing their attention and maintaining interest through content that they genuinely value.
What do they do after they’ve read it?
So your audience like what they read; what do you want them to do next and how do you get them to do it? Think carefully about your call to action.
What do you do in response?
You’ve got your message right and people respond to your email. Will you build on the momentum and send them further emails? Maybe you’ll phone them up? Whatever you decide to do, it’s best to have a plan in place before you’ve pressed send and the emails start to land in inboxes.
So that’s the planning stage of your campaign done. In my next blog on email marketing I will look at how you start to put your plan into action by creating targeted and relevant content.
Thanks for reading.
MIKE
Mike McNabb
Client Services Executive
Tags: Email Marketing, Mike