Remember the post I did earlier this week, based upon some older texts I wrote back in the days when I (and many others with me) was trying to explain the benefits of email marketing to marketers?
I got some nice reactions by mail, on Twitter and on the post itself. So I decided to put another one online. Again, I would like your feedback on this and know how you would change it. Remember that this was written ages ago.
The question that was tackled was how companies should start an email marketing campaign, what strategic questions they should answer and how they should build lists and personalize their mailings.
It was meant to give some tips to businesses that were either contemplating starting with email marketing or started it but didn’t know how to do it very well. I guess you could say that it was the time when people just took emails from everywhere and started using email marketing as the online equivalent of direct marketing (“opt-in, permission, never heard of that”).
So here is how I explained them to do it back then, with just one line of text added (guess which one). What is still valid and what is not… Comment away after going through the post!
Defining the marketing scope
The first points in email marketing are the “why” and “how”. Email marketing can serve a great deal of marketing and even sales purposes but before pushing the SEND button of your first campaign different questions should be considered. This includes:
- What marketing and/or sales goals do you want to achieve
- Which customer segments do you want to reach in order to achieve those goals?
- Who will you work with for the different aspects of your email campaign? The database, the sending, the creative, the copy, the follow-up…
- What will be the impact for your internal organization once you start sending email campaigns?
- What tools will you use
- How will the email campaign be integrated in your overall marketing strategy
- How will you involve your recipients and communities in the emails?
- How will you create sharable content?
Defining the target group and constructing/growing an email list
Define the target groups of people you would like to subscribe to your emails. Your current customers are a key target group. But if you want to realize emailings for a specific group of people, you will first need to analyze which segments will be most receptive to it and how you will reach them to have them subscribe to your emails.
The best email marketing campaigns enable companies to customize the information they send according to their different recipient segments and sometimes even individual customers. This requires a professional email marketing tool and a properly segmented database. Email marketing is closely linked with databases and CRM. If the only information your database contains is the name and address of the recipient you won’t be able to personalize your offerings.
Also, your CRM application and/or database should ideally be able to receive the input you receive from your email marketing actions. Thus enriching the information in your database enables you to personalize your email marketing further and further, finally resulting in a one-to-one communication with your customer or prospect.
This guarantees the best conversion and effect for you and your recipients.
That’s it. What do you think? Outdated or still valid? What has to be rewritten or deleted and what can stay, according to you?
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