Your email marketing plan simplified: The purpose
Your email marketing has the potential to be your most useful online marketing activities. But if that’s your goal, you need to have a plan. As the saying goes, a goal without a plan is just a wish.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll take a look at three things you should consider when planning your email marketing.
Email marketing purpose
There are many specific purposes for email campaigns. You might want to build credibility and awareness so that people will know, like and trust you even if they’ve never met you.
You may want to create an avenue to test ideas before releasing them to the public. Whether it’s a special deal, new product or service, a workshop, or something else entirely, your email list can potentially serve as a great place to test those ideas before spending money on other marketing.
You may simply want to build a cost-effective marketing platform. Whatever the case, make sure you have a clearly defined purpose for your email newsletter. Without a specific goal, you won’t know when it’s effective.
Trackable goals
And when you’re setting your goal and planning, make sure your goal is trackable as well. Whether you’re just following up with people in person to find out your effectiveness, or actually looking at statistics in your email provider’s administrative interface, you should have some way of determining if you’ve reached your goal.
If you do like statistics, there are a few you can look at.
1. Number of subscribers. If you track this, make sure you remember that quality is better than quantity.
2. How many people open your email. Some of the more popular email providers will let you compare this to your past emails and to the average in your industry.
3. How many people click on links in your email. This is one reason why many email newsletters that make use of articles only include the first part of the article with a link to read more.
Next time we’ll take a look at planning your email newsletter’s content. If you’d like assistance with designing or running your email newsletter, the team here at T&S Web Design would be glad to help. Contact us for more information.
Email Marketing Series
- Your email marketing plan simplified: The purpose
- Your email marketing plan simplified: The content
- Your email marketing plan simplified: The frequency
Hey Tim, how do you confirm how many people have opened up your email?
A good email newsletter provider will provide that sort of data. If you’re doing it yourself through Outlook or some other email client, you may not be able to tell.