As the saying goes, Those who fail to plan are planning to fail. And if you want to be consistently successful with your email marketing channel you need a plan. A simple one will do. Here’s a link to one we use for our clients to get them up and running and another one that’s more indepth.
Take stock and look at your current situation – your campaign successes and failures, your subscriber demographics. From here, you can look for quick wins and low hanging fruit.
Doug Dennison
CEO & Co-founder
MailNinja
The first step to creating an email marketing strategy is to define your goals. It all starts with a goal. Without a goal, you can’t achieve success. Always begin with the end in mind. When preparing your strategy, the first thing you should do is ask yourself “What is the goal of my campaign?” Once you answer that, everything you do from that point forward should be focused on achieving your goal.
Adam Q. Holden-Bache
Director of Email Marketing
Enventys Partners
Ask yourself– “What is my goal with using email to market my business?” Do you want to sell more products, get new leads, simply educate your subscribers weekly or show over time that you’re the expert? You have to know your goal before you do anything else. Spend some time really defining your objective and then mapping out exactly how you can you use email as a channel to reach that goal.
Emily Ryan
Co-Founder and Email Strategist
Westfield Creative
You probably know the P.O.S.T. sequence: People, Objectives, Strategies, and Tools. Start with the people: you and the people you are writing to / communicating with, the actual ones, and those you’d like to reach. And be very specific in defining your goals, that is have a clear view of business goals and priorities and define how email marketing can contribute to those goals. Then you can start to underline the possible strategies, how to measure your success and which tools you do need; but without Pople and Objectives in mind, you won’t go anywhere.
Alessandra Farabegoli
Digital Strategist, Co-Founder
Digital Update and Freelancecamp Italia
Having clear business objectives you want to achieve within say 12 months and then aligning your email marketing plan to help meet those objectives. I call that, Email with Purpose. And it’s what we do every day at Spike.
Glenn Edley
Director & Email Strategist
Spike
A place for everything, and everything in its place. Email marketing strategy, like any platform or tactic, should not be developed in a vacuum. Start by looking at what place email plays in your overall communications and lead generation strategy for your organization. Understand what you want email to do, and then determine how it can meet that goal.
MaryAnn Pfeiffer
Digital Marketing Strategist
108 Degrees Digital Marketing
“Email marketing is about 2 things… emails… and data.
So if you’re creating an email marketing strategy (which we do an awful lot for our customers), you need to have a good idea of the emails you want to send, and the data you need to send them. Too many clients I speak to get bogged down in the data without thinking about the emails they could send – it’s called email marketing for a reason, it’s about sending emails – so start by thinking about what emails you want to send and to who (the data).”
Robin Adams
Founder