Planning Your Email Marketing Campaign: Part 2

In Datran Media’s 2010 Annual Marketing and Media Survey, email was proclaimed as the strongest advertising channel by 39.4% of industry executives.

To enjoy a high ROI from your email marketing campaign, you need to plan it well. Fail in this aspect, and all your efforts will go to waste. On the other hand, an effective email marketing campaign can increase your bottom-line quickly.

This brings to the most important question – how to plan an email marketing campaign? The answer is actually not that at all complex. When creating your email marketing campaign, just keep the following pointers in mind:

• Connect with your customers first – If you have just started your email marketing campaign, you should avoid making sales pitch in your first few correspondences. The strategy of going for the kill straightaway can be counterproductive and you may lose names in your email list faster than Ben Johnson on steroids.Instead, first focus on developing rapport with your clients. Once you have their attention, you can then ask for their business.
• Test market your value offering – Test market your campaign offering before sending it to everyone on the list. First, send the email to a test target audience to evaluate the reaction, and then, if required, modify your email marketing campaign according to the response you get.
• Follow the Pareto principle – One rule that holds true to nearly every business is the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule. Pareto principle in relation to your business states that 20% of your customers will account for nearly 80% of your sales. This is why, it is necessary that you have different email marketing strategies for different customers – customers who account for the major portion of your sales and customers who buy only sporadically from you.
• Segment your email list – For an email marketing campaign to be effective, just having a long email list is not enough. You need to categorize it. When you send an email newsletter to 100 people, not all of them will read your email. Some will read them, some will even forward your message to others, while others will send your email to trash bin straightaway.

Mailhatch allow you to see the action that recipients take upon receiving an email from you. Based on this knowledge you can formulate different email marketing strategies for people who read your email, people who regularly forward your email and people who do not read your email. For instance, you can offer special discounts to evangelists of your business to further strengthen their loyalty to you.

Make use of the above-discussed tips and avoid common email marketing pitfalls to drive maximum ROI from your email marketing campaign.  Next, we will learn about different email marketing pitfalls and how you can avoid them.