Email marketing is a powerful tool that, when used correctly, can bolster your bottom line and give your customers the added value they expect. Launching an email campaign can be daunting – there are a lot of factors to consider. If these are disregarded, your efforts could be wasted and your customers could get upset! Fortunately if you have clear objectives and a little ingenuity, the basics are fairly easy to get right.
The more detailed your answers are to the following questions, the more successful your campaign is likely to be.
Know what you want to achieve:
- Do you want to sell a specific product / service / seminar / workshop?
- Do you want to educate your customers to add value to their lives?
- Do you want to educate your customers so you can service them more efficiently?
- Do you want to remind your customers that you’re around for advice & support?
Once you’ve answered these, you can decide what to send and who to send it to. Regardless of your objective, your email campaign should add value to the people who’ll read it. Hard sell works sometimes (if the offer is brilliant) but usually emails that add value – even if the reader doesn’t buy – are the most effective.
Example:
If you’re trying to sell a seminar about tax legislation changes to Financial Managers, you could summarise a key legislation change in your email (the full changes to be discussed in your seminar, of course). By giving them this brief summary (and maybe a quick checklist of the legislation requirements that they could use immediately), you are proving your credibility and illustrating that the updated law is something they need to know now.
Once you’ve decided on your objectives, audience and content, you’re ready to design the email, send it out and analyse your results so you can make strategic decisions going forward. You could handle some of these elements in-house but the processes can get very technical and have some stringent legal implications.
You may prefer to outsource your email campaign to an email marketing company that specialises in every aspect of this marketing process. A specialist company will understand email strategy, optimal design, spam triggers, deliverability, report analysis and more and could help you to navigate the myriad of possibilities of your campaign.