How Do You Develop An Email Marketing Strategy?

Often a business grows organically. You sell a product or provide a service, then you get customers and you modify your business goals as your customers articulate their needs. The same thing often happens with email marketing campaigns. You decide to send out targeted emails first to potential customers, then to existing customers. However, you do not take into account developing a strategy for your email marketing.

However, strategy is one of the most important, and the most overlooked, elements of a successful email marketing campaign. It's possible to practice email marketing for years without a formal strategy. But there comes a time when you need one to take your efforts to the next level.

Here's how.

Here are the 10 steps you need to take to develop an effective email strategy:

1. Identify qualitative goals. This is just a fancy way of saying what you want the program to do for your company. Typical goals include selling my product (first and foremost), delivering qualified leads, driving repeat traffic to my website and generating revenue through advertising. Bottom line: What you want to achieve is to acquire new customers and retain existing ones.

2. Analyze the current situation. This step involves running through your head the nuts and bolts of your strategy. Ask yourself such questions as "How many emails do I currently have?, "How did I get them?", "How much do I mail now?", "How do I get new names?". In moving forward, rule out what has not been effective and take the steps that are effective.

3. Complete a competitive analysis. Find out everything you can about who your competitors are. Get on their email marketing lists. Find out if their emails are informational or promotional. You need to be armed with as much information as you can possibly get.

4. Define the target audience. Do you really understand your customers and their needs? Will potential customers be different from those you have now? It is even important to gauge how much time and how frequently you think a customer will spend reading your emails.

5. Determine which types of emails meet your needs. You can send emails out only for renewal of goods and services. These are called "transactional invoice emails". More common are relationship emails, which contain any content as long as you maintain visibility with your customers. You can also use communicative emails to go out to the press.

6. Develop a frequency and send schedule. Some companies send out emails on a weekly basis and keep them short, no more than 5 or 6 brief paragraphs. See what your competitors do regarding frequency and a send schedule, then determine if that would work for you. You may even want to synchronize your schedule to your competitors' so that you send on different days of the week.

7. Design the email template. Just like the look and feel of your website, every email that goes out should have a uniform look and feel. Consistency is important for branding. You may also want to use the same color palette as your website.

8. Create quantitative goals. Quantitative goals measure how successful your email campaign is in terms of numbers. Have your sales gone up? Have you gained new customers? These are relatively easy things to measure.

9. Compile a budget and ROI projections. This may actually be the first thing you need to do. You don't know what the limits on your campaign are until you have a budget. Hopefully, with more business, your email marketing budget will grow.

10. Evaluate results and tweak your strategy accordingly. This step is necessary in any plan. After several months, go back and look at where things are qualitatively and quantitatively, and make necessary changes.