Shift 1
Email is increasingly a marriage of data and advertising.
At its best, email marketing blends art and science, and an email marketing star can wear both hats equally. True permission email marketing success occurs when a marketer delivers a relevant message on target with the audience's needs. So what does that mean?
The relevance side has to do with creating a message that speaks to what your subscribers signed up for and what they expect and want. No, a recycled offer of your newspaper ad or a cut-and-paste job of your direct mail piece in HTML form does not accomplish this. As I have said many times, most email marketing campaigns are based on a company's marketing goals, rather than what subscribers want and need. So create a list of the following:
- Business goals of the campaign
- Other marketing tactics and their approaches (how will they complement email and vice versa)
- Your past campaigns' success areas (what subscribers clicked, what they didn't)
- Key message/value proposition (try summarizing in one bullet)
- The call to action/specific value for the subscriber
- How the creative will accomplish your goal (include rendering and user experience here)
- How you will measure and define success
- What's next after this campaign?
The data side is what separates email marketing from its marketing brethren. So use it. So how do you leverage the data you have, even for databases that only capture minimal aspects of the subscribers? Compile a list of answers to these questions:
- What aspects of your campaign do you want to test (subject line, message, creative, offer)?
- How do you want to segment your campaign based on your database (gender, ZIP code, customer versus non customer)?
- How do you plan to treat your email subscribers based on their "performance" (users who clicked, users who didn't open, users who signed up in the past 30 days, etc.)?
- How will you follow up based on their "performance" (send follow-up message to those who clicked on the call-to-action but didn't convert, users who did not open or click, etc.)?
- How will you measure success?
- What's next after this campaign?
If you read closely, you will notice that determining success and performing post-campaign "autopsies" are a common thread in these two lists. These elements are among the most important -- as well as the most ignored -- aspects of any email campaign. Ensure these are on your lists; it's worth the time. If more evidence is needed, several of our clients have done this with great success. Check some case studies here.
