Benjamin Franklin once said “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” This couldn’t be truer when it comes to email marketing campaigns.
Think of your email campaign as a general thinks of a war. Success hinges upon a well thought out plan with clearly defined goals.
Your team members are your trusted advisors. Use a collective brainstorm to come up with a killer strategy.
What are your goals?
Determine your goals first – before beginning an email campaign. What do you want to get out of the campaign? Is your goal to spread brand awareness or improve conversion rates? Being very clear about your goals defines which metrics you use to track results.
Include all members of your team on this brainstorming session. This keeps everyone in your organization on the same page.
Make a list of all the goals. Don’t be overwhelmed if it seems you have too many goals. Keep it simple. Prioritize and implement one goal at a time.
The workflows feature in your CRM software serves as your battle plan for your campaign.
With workflows you can sketch out the outline of your campaigns. You decide a start date, end date, and which days you want the emails to be sent. Make sure each email has a specific purpose to achieve your overall goal for the campaign.
Track Your Results
They say “eyes are the windows to the soul”. Your CRM dashboard is the window to the soul of your email campaign. Once you have a clearly defined goal, use the dashboard to decide which metrics you want to track.Here are the default metrics of every campaign.
• Unique opens.This stat shows how many people opened your email. This is a great stat for brand awareness campaigns.
• Open rate.Watch the percentage of opens compared to your overall list size. The open rate is a good metric for tracking the effectiveness of your subject lines.
Your CRM software lets you use A/B testing to send two batches of emails and track which one has the better open rate.
• Opt out percentage.If the opt out percentage is high, it is a red flag something in your campaign needs to be changed.
• Bounce rate. List hygiene is shown in your bounce rate. A bounced email is an email which never gets to the user’s inbox. It is an indication of an inactive email address. Remove these emails from your list so they don’t affect your spam reputation.
The beauty of the CRM dashboard is you can track any metric you find useful. Your metrics should be solely based on the goal of your campaign.
Here’s an example: if you want to measure conversions, your metric is tied to your call to action of your email. Offer a free download and track how many people download vs. how many people received the email.
The bottom line is everything comes down to your ability to plan. A solid plan produces solid results.