Interesting in adding email marketing to the mix? Not sure where to begin? It seems as if there are a few different ways to attack email marketing. The one extreme is to plan and plot the foreseeable goals and plans for the campaign weeks in advance, outlining exactly what results you would like to receive and tying the content and copy to trigger those behaviors. The latter, and unfortunately the most popular way, is to take whatever materials you already have provided to you, throw together some text and images with links, click send and hope for the best. Which technique do you think renders the best results? If you chose the first one, you would be absolutely correct. But all too often, email marketing seems to be more of an afterthought or simply an addition to your current marketing plan simply because “you know you should.”
Whether or not you choose to believe it, Email is one of the most widely used and most popular forms of communication.
Pingdom compiled a great report of statistics for 2011, in regards to Emarketing. Below are some of the most fascinating stats for the year of 2011.
- The number of email accounts rose to 3.146 billion accounts. Click to tweet.
- The average corporate user receives an average of 112 emails per day. Click to tweet.
- The estimated return on investment for $1 on email marketing is $44.25. Click to tweet.
Still interested in putting some more thought in to your email marketing plan and campaign? Good idea!
Below I have compiled THREE of the major ‘must haves’ needed in order to successfully execute a top notch email marketing campaign.
- Have a clear and concise message that you want to relay to your reader. Don’t throw five million points at them and expect them to pick one and run with it. Plan out what the optimum behavior would be and plan your campaign around getting that desired reaction.
- If you don’t have them already, create yourself an unsubscribe and assign a “To” and “Reply to” email addresses. Even though the thought of unsubscribes to your brilliant campaign appears unforeseeable, reality is, people will unsubscribe. Make sure you assign appropriate email addresses for these actions and more importantly, monitor these inboxes closely.
- Plan your segmentation and testing. During the development stages of your marketing, plan on how you plan on segmenting your lists and providing the reader with detailed information to trigger those responses from them. If you’re just starting out with testing, pull the open or click through reports for first campaign, and send a specific email to those users educating or more detail specific.
What do you think about these three points? I know there are much more, but do you think that I outlined some of the most missed? I would love to hear from you!
As always, Happy Emailing and Thanks for reading!
Stephanie Fischbach
