Starting Your Email Campaign

Email marketing consists of at least 5 elements that the marketer needs to consider. They are:

• ·         The Recipient or Targets
• ·         The Proposition or Offer
• ·         The Copy elements
• ·         The Email Design
• ·         The Schedule

These are the building blocks you use when creating your email campaigns so think of them often in your process. The recipients or Targets must be quantified in terms of the demographics of your target market

which could include age, gender, location, income and any other specifics within that market. For example if you are marketing prenatal vitamins you would not normally attempt to reach out to individuals who are looking for geriatric supplements.

Your Proposition is a promise of value to be delivered and a belief from the reader that the value would be experienced. Creating a value proposition is a part of a business strategy. That is based on a differentiated customer values. Satisfying customers is the source of sustainable value creation.

Developing a value proposition is based on a review and analysis of the benefits, costs and value that can be delivered to customers. Positioning of a value is based on the scenario of Benefits - Cost and expressed in terms of dollars or some other measurement standard.

The copy elements of your offering and the design of your email go hand in hand. Copy, often called typography, is the fundamental use of words that appeal to the reader. For example, if your readership is made up of farmers your copy or printed information should appeal to the terms that they would normally read. Agricultural terms and examples would work better for this group. By the same token, farm implements and other agricultural icons would be better visuals than race cars and flower baskets. Keep copy and design in tuned to your demographics.

Finally, give a lot of consideration to your email schedule in more than one perspective. First consider frequency. Should you send once a day or twice, or is once a month better? Only you can decide based on testing. Testing allows you to look at results and refine your process. Another scheduling criterion is the time of day you send your email. Review your open times and plan to send shortly before most people open to get the maximum benefit. You do not want your email to be buried at the bottom of the pile when it could be the first thing your reader would see.

It is important that the emails you send must fit into an overall lead generation process. This process starts with acquiring a prospect’s email address. With an email address in hand, you can now send emails that promote various offers to the prospect. The objective of email marketing is to get prospects to open your email, click through to your landing page, and fill out the form on that page. When this happens marketing can continue to engage the lead, or sales can follow up.

Keep in mind these best practices. First, make sure that you target a specific type of buyer with the email. Ideally, your buyers will be segmented by some factor you can appeal to directly. Second, offer them something compelling so that they want to take the action you offer. Third, send the email at a time when prospects are more likely to respond. Best practices like these will improve the performance of your email marketing efforts. 

Comments and questions are welcome!