How do you know when you are doing well in Email Marketing? The end of year totals, with one column being taken from the other, shows whether and by how much you are in profit. What it does not tell you is whether your investment of time and money has been well-directed.
You need to work out where you want to be in, say a year, three years and the long-term and then come up with a method to get there. Put simply, you have to set targets. To merely hope that you will increase the size of your email lists is not a target. There needs to be a figure, a precise goal, so that you know if you are, in fact, getting as much from your business as you should be, or could be.
We will assume you are familiar with the SMART way of tackling goal setting. If you are not, or feel a little woolly about it, then Google “S.M.A.R.T. goals” and be ready for a massive choice to appear.
Start with overall goals first and then refine them as time and experience dictates.
Here are six general ones which, whilst they apply to any business, are more specific to an email campaign:
- Generate leads
- Convert leads into subscribers/customers
- Sell more to existing customers
- Reduce costs
- Improve brand awareness
- Conduct market research.
These might seem more like bland awareness but stick with it. What comes next is the important bit.
Let us consider 3. It is obviously an excellent marketing ploy to sell more. Who could argue? However ‘more’ is not precise enough. A non-exhaustive list of what selling more might mean would include:
Sell more items to each individual on your email lists,
Sell higher value items to them,
Reduce churn,
Increase range of stock.
It doesn’t end there of course. You have to go deeper still. For instance, to reduce churn, that is customer attrition, you might consider setting up a newsletter, special facilities on a website, a system of reminders, event triggers and more.
Once you have gone through all six main headings, the sub-headings and the detailed methods, in comes SMART and you will have a detailed list of options.
You will not be able to put them all into action immediately so you will need to prioritise. The French have a word for it: triage. This is a method of determining who to treat first at a major incident when there are conflicting demands on limited resources. Put simply, there are the ones who are going to die regardless of what you do, those who will live if no one touches them and the last group gets the treatment.
For you it is slightly different. There is a group that you cannot afford at this time, the one that will carry on regardless and then the one that requires a bit of investment, but not too much.
We will have a look at detailed plans soon.