Planning An Email Marketing Campaign
Targeted email marketing campaigns take a little bit of time and patience to achieve success. Many people make the mistake of thinking that their email campaigns consist primarily of simply sending out emails. In fact, much of the well-planned marketing campaign should take place before a single message ever goes out to anyone.
You’ll want to begin by thinking about the purpose of your campaign, then the various strategies that you might use to achieve that purpose. This requires that you develop an understanding of your audience, the types of messages that they will be likely to respond positively to, and also the timing of the messages you’re sending out.
Discovering The Purpose of Your Email Campaign
This first step is so deceptively simple that many people forget about it entirely. They assume that sending out an advertisement is better than sending out no advertisement, so why not?
But think about it like this: you are about to send a message to a group of people who were interested enough in you and your products that they agreed to be contacted. What if this is the only message from you that they ever open? If there is no fundamental purpose for the message, then your only chance to connect with a highly qualified lead could be waste.
Don’t misunderstand–this does not mean that every message you send out should push the hard sale. That’s not going to work for most people either. But there has to be a reason for each message, something that it aims to accomplish. In many cases, this may be as simple as building trust. Email marketing campaigns are excellent avenues for building trust prior to asking for the sale, but you won’t build up that trust just by virtue of having sent out 400 words of copy. You need to be active in accomplishing the goal of your mailing, and it helps to have a clear idea of that goal in advance.
Marketing To Your Target Audience
The goals of your message should have a lot to do with the people it is being sent to. This goes above and beyond the standard demographic targeting, to looking at the types of actions that a person on your list has performed. If you are going to send out a sales letter, think about whether or not it will benefit you to send it to people who have already purchased your product. Or whether there is some add-on or up-sell that you could be pitching to them instead.
Imagine what would happen if you created a special list segment containing only people who have mentioned your product or service on their blogs. Now there’s a group of people to pitch a special offer to. Email marketing campaign software is essential for setting up this type of market segmentation in your email campaigns.
What Type Of Message Best Fits Your Email Marketing Campaign?
If people are signing up for your list after buying your product, your messages to them should be somewhat different than messages for people who are signing up from informational pages on your site. For informational subscribers, there is probably no better or more efficient strategy than to use email autoresponders to build up slowly to the call to action. This way you can lovingly hand-craft a series of trust-building sales messages that gently woo the potential customer, and deliver them over a tested period of time. The best part is that you only have to write the email series once, and then once the subscriber buys you can use 1-2-All’s subscriber actions to have them automatically switched over to your ‘relationship management’ list for existing customers.
Timing Your Email Marketing Campaign
I mentioned sending out your email campaign along with a tested timetable. This is a really important piece of the email marketing puzzle and one which will be different for every demographic and every product niche.
Most people just choose an arbitrary frequency to send their newsletters out and try to stick with that schedule. This can be a good tactic for promoting an air of stability for your company. If this is your campaign strategy, you’ll want to set up a calendar or timetable for yourself so that you’re not rushing to produce sub-par content at the last minute every week or month.
On the other hand, sometimes it can be wiser to consider the natural fluctuations of your market. If you are promoting a seasonal product, no one is going to be interested in reading about it until the season approaches. So if you send out a newsletter every month, people will already be used to ignoring you by the time the appointed season comes around. In this case, you will probably actually make more sales by not sending anything out for months at a time.