Email Plan
To successfully use email marketing, you need to develop a plan. The plan will assist you to know
Why you are emailing.
Who you are mailing to?
What to include in emails to achieve your objectives?
How to grow the emailing list.
In developing that plan, you need to consider the following issues.
Define Your Objectives
What is it that you want the email campaign to achieve? Some options could be
Sell products or services.
You want to use email to generate sales of your products or services.
Drive traffic to your site.
You want to get people to bookmark your site.
Build brand awareness.
You want to reinforce your corporate identity.
Build your opt in list and registration by customers and potential customers.
You want to capture name and address details of visitors.
Develop and present great offers for your products or services.
You want to get customers to purchase online.
Knowing why you will be writing to a specific group will help determine the target audience.
Identify Your target Audience
Do you want to aim your offer at existing or potential customers? Remember it is much easier to sell to existing customers than it is to new customers. If you are going to target new customers make sure the list you use is a verified opt-in list.
You may want to segment your target audience by age, by occupation, by sex or some other demographic.
For sustained success you will need to also grow your list and a good way to do that is to offer potential customers an incentive to sign up.
Construct the Content and Offer
You have to target the message to your audience. You need to ensure that the message follows the motivating sequence known as the “AIDA” principle discussed later in this information. Ask yourself
What will they get out of reading my message?
What content will be sent including marketing and editorial.
What can you offer each target market that you are trying to reach?
How will they benefit from your products and services?
The more you know and understand about your target audience the better the emails you will write to them. All your emails should be relevant and of value to the recipients. More information about how to write effective emails is explained in another section.
Media
What form should the communication take?
What kinds of lists to use?
What type of message style such as news items, daily tips, brief commercial messages and so on?
Choose the format
Are you going to use HTML or text format? HTML format is far more visually engaging.
Current research shows that 88% prefer to receive HTML emails as compared to 12% who prefer plain text.
A common tactic these days is to include a link to a web page for those that cannot read HTML emails with their email reader.
Another option would be to offer both with the recipient informing you of which format they prefer.
Better still is to send the email in both plain text and HTML and the recipients email program can show the relevant choice.
Delivering the Emails (resources)
Are you going to send the emails yourself or are you going to use a third-party supplier? In your decision you will have to take into consideration who is going to
Build and manage the list.
Consider the technological issues.
Craft the email.
Consider software requirements.
Consider hardware requirements.
Improve the success of emails by sending them at the most opportune days and times of the week. There is no right or wrong answer here. The correct times will depend on your target audience and how well you understand them.
There are a range of ways that email can be delivered.
Do it yourself. The cheapest and not too much of a problem with a list of less than 200 names. A good option when starting out if finances are limited.
Purchase a specific emailing program that sends the emails, maintains a mailing list and provides statistics.
Use a free service to do it for you. There are a whole range of companies that will do it for you on the net. Why? Because when you go to email your message the host company places an advertisement of theirs in your message to your list. Not a particularly good idea if you trying to appear as a professional business person.
Use a paid service that will do all the management tasks for you and ensure delivery of your email. There are a range of companies that offer this type of service.
Tracking and Analysis
Some of the tracking to be carried out would include:
Who is going to record and deal with undeliverables?
Who is going to record and analyse?
Click throughs.
Length of time visitors stayed at the site.
What other pages they clicked on.
How many new leads were generated?
What was the actual conversion rate?
Can you do all of this yourself or will you need help with some or all of it?
Budget
How much will all this cost and where is the money coming from to fund it.
Schedule
Develop a timetable for all the phases of your email plan.
Determining how often you will be sending emails (daily, weekly, monthly) will depend on your target audience and what frequency is acceptable to them.
Whatever the schedule emails should be sent on a regular basis.
Daily
This can work if you have a loyal following such as a blogger. However daily emails may make the reader feel overwhelmed by the number of emails.
Weekly
With a weekly email cycle customers will not be surprised to hear from you and they most likely will not be overwhelmed.
Monthly
Monthly emails are a good choice especially if your readers see them as valuable emails. Monthly emails with discount offers are a way to make them valuable. The down side is that with monthly emails they may get lost in the readers in box.
Analyse the Results
Results should come in quickly not like snail mail direct marketing. The results need to be analysed to determine if corrective action is necessary. A technique used to measure your results is outlined under a separate heading.
Template
A template to help you in your planning details follows is listed below.
My objectives are:
My target market is:
What will I have to include in my messages to motivate the target market?
Which email format will I use and why?
How will I deliver the emails and handle the follow up?
Budget. How much is it?
What is the timetable for the delivery? (schedule)
How will I analyse the results and the process for corrective action if necessary?