A successful email campaign has the power to increase your exposure, bring in revenue, and win you new clients. But without careful attention, an email campaign can quickly derail and end up confusing potential clients, harming your credibility, and even wasting your time.
Here are five key steps to follow to make sure your next email campaign doesn’t make you lose your mind.
- Plan. Whether you’re working with a marketing strategist or just your own team, it’s absolutely essential to sit down before the email campaign starts and lay out a detailed plan of action. Your plan should include an outline of the content you want to send, when you want to send the emails, and which lists you’ll send them to. Try working backwards from the final date in your campaign to keep yourself focused on important deadlines.
- Know your goals. You won’t know whether or not your email campaign was successful if you don’t know what you were trying to achieve. Before diving in, be sure to set specific goals for your email campaign. These might include selling a certain amount, getting a specific number of people to register for an event, or prompting responses from a set group of people. Be sure everyone involved with the campaign is clear about the details of these goals.
- Set deadlines. You’ll want to set two types of deadlines: those for your list (e.g. deadlines when special offers expire, which you’ll explain in the emails) and those for your team (e.g. deadlines by which each batch of emails has to be finished). Trust us: it’s stressful for everyone if these dates keep changing, so be sure to be reasonable from the get-go.
- Maintain open communication lines. Chances are, even the best plans will need to be tweaked at some point during an email campaign. Whether you need to add an extra email or two to the series you’re sending out, modify the pricing on one of the services you’re offering, or otherwise alter the original email plan, it’s essential to have a predetermined communication method to get your message across. Make sure everyone is kept abreast of changes, or you risk sending untimely or inaccurate emails to your list, both of which can cost you big-time in the credibility department.
Here at Sumer, we’ve run a lot of email campaigns, and we know how frantic they can get if they aren’t planned out properly. But there’s no need to let your emails drive you straight to Bonkerville—just stick to our fail-safe plan, and you’ll have a winning campaign in no time.
Have you ever experienced an email campaign disaster? How did you handle it?
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