2009 Can Be Your Year of Success — If You Plan For It Now
Do you have an email marketing communications plan?
Creating one isn't as hard as you might think. In fact it's fun, it's easy, and the upfront planning you do now can have a huge impact in the months to come in more effective campaigns.
A year-long email marketing communications plan helps you be proactive with customers, rather than reacting to market trends. It combines what you learn about what clicks and misses with your customers with seasonal and industry events that you can map across a calendar. Ready to get started?
Why Do You Need an Email Marketing Communications Plan?
Creating an email template, matching the graphics to your brand and website, and writing good content is only half the work that needs to be done. The other 50 percent is analyzing your email tracking reports and planning your campaigns based on what you learn about customers and what's happening in your field and the market.
3 Steps to Create a Simple Plan that Is Valuable, Relevant, Lively, & Fun!
1. Look at Your Email Tracking and Reporting for Trends
Your tracking and reporting data is a treasure trove of information about your customers' responses to your communications. Your data is posted for 90 days. Take a look back: Who's opening? Who's clicking through? Which subject lines worked best? Which calls to action were most effective? Can you re-promote to subscribers based on what you learned? And remember, you're not alone in your efforts:
- Join our ConnectUp! User Community and ask non-competitors how they planned their email campaigns.
- Find email marketing stats for your industry through resources like MarketingSherpa.com.
- What's your competition doing? Subscribe to their newsletters.
The lion's share of the work is not in creating the communications, but in analyzing the results and nurturing better responses. Build regular analysis into your campaigns -- at least quarterly. Put it on your calendar.
2. Plan How Often Customers Want to Hear from You
How often can you realistically do a newsletter? A promotional offer? A sales event? Most B2B and B2C operations should communicate at least twice monthly -- more often if you have events. If you're a solopreneur and/or just starting out, communicate quarterly at a minimum. Permission is perishable, so it's important that you commit and stick to a schedule you can manage, and follow up with subscribers who opt-in to your list promptly.
Ask customers on your sign-up page how often they want to hear from you and what they want to receive from you -- a monthly newsletter, quarterly updates, weekly specials, etc. If you're just starting out, say you have a "periodic" newsletter. Remember: under promise and over deliver.
Items such as press releases, urgent industry news bulletins, etc. are time locked and often do not fit into a regular schedule. Plan for them, and allow enough flexibility in your calendar to accommodate the unexpected. News happens.
3. Schedule Your Email Communications for the Calendar Year
Now that you've analyzed your reports and figured out how often you want to communicate with customers and what you want to send them, it's time to sit down with the calendar and plan. Here are some ways to tackle the coming 12 months:
- Holidays, seasons, fiscal years and & buying cycles -- Oh my! Plot out email marketing communications that leverage these dates and periods of time.
- What upcoming business events do you want to communicate? You don't have to be a large company to create events for your business. These could include new product and service rollouts, overstock and clearance sales, volunteer opportunities, announcements of new hires.
- Leverage happenings in your target industry. Get a hold of the periodical editorial calendars published by your industry publications. Plan your communications around major conferences, legislation that affects the industry, etc. and show your subscribers that you've got your finger on the pulse of your industry.
- Create more than one template for the different types of email marketing communications you send out. You may have different templates in place for your newsletter, events invitations, coupons and promotions, press releases, etc. Select and embed images and craft coupons in advance so those campaigns are ready to go when scheduled date hits.
- Get a jump on 2009 by creating some of the work in advance. Write the copy for seasonal features and other topics you know your customers are interested in early in the year, or pre-schedule your fully completed email communications to be sent automatically.
Your email marketing plan can serve as your roadmap for 2009. By scheduling your communications in advance, you'll set benchmarks for what you want to accomplish and build regular reporting analysis into your program. You'll also have the flexibility to make adjustments as your customers' needs and the market changes. A plan puts you in charge.
Article Author: Gina Watkins Constant Contact Regional Development Director, D.C. Metro Area
Comments