Define Your Email Marketing Plan
It is important to define a plan, a road map, to follow before you start your Email Marketing campaigns. You wouldn’t start on a long journey without a map & a plan in place. Similar when it comes to Email Marketing.
Here are five areas to help you with your plan:
1. Define your goals.
Are you trying to motivate purchases, reinforce your brand, bring visitors back to visit your site, store or office, cue the reading of an article, prompt requests for more information, increase attendance for an event, obtain donations, appointments or sign ups for a service?
2. Define your audience.
Are you targeting a segment of your customer base or your entire house list? What are the needs, wants, and interests of those on your list? What is important to them? What will motivate them to take action?
3. Define your message.
Engage your recipients and deliver on their needs. Use what you know about recipients to determine how, and in what order, to describe and illustrate the benefits of your offer.
4. Define your vehicle.
Now that you understand your goal and your audience, how can you best communicate? Think about what kinds of campaigns you may use. You have many options including newsletters, holiday or seasonal promotions, preferred customer sales, new product or service announcements, press releases, event invitations, holiday greetings and more.
5. Define your delivery timing.
When is your audience most likely to open and read your message? While audiences vary, we have found that mid-day delivery is better than mornings or evenings. Choosing the right day of the week is also important. Often Tuesday and Wednesday achieve better results than the beginning or the end of the week. Your audience may be different, so do some testing to determine the delivery timing that is right for you.
