This is a guest post by Carlo de la Paz from Branders.com.
Planning for email marketing strategies is like producing a film or movie. There are many “production stages” involved.
In filmmaking, you can’t just grab a video recorder and shoot scenes right away. You need to follow a timeline that will allow you to take care of the many aspects and requirements of the project.
It is the same with email marketing. There is a need to follow a sequence so you can plan, execute work properly, and finally, gauge the results.
If film making has pre-production, production, and post-production stages, so does email marketing. You need to make sure to adhere diligently to these three stages so you won’t miss anything.
Check out the three stages of email marketing and what it entails for you, the marketing expert:
1. Pre-Production Stage
The pre-production stage of email marketing is essentially about the different preliminary preparations.
At this stage you will need to define your target audience and find what their different needs are. You will also decide on the date of the targeted emails as well as which email marketing software to use. Here are some tips you can opt to follow:
- Get To Know Your Target Audience Closely
It is not enough to identify their basic demographics. Find out their lifestyle and how it fits or suits the products and services you offer. Determine what tickles their fancy and what their main interests are. It also helps to know how they generally communicate so you can adjust the tone of your emails.
- Locate And Purchase Great Email Marketing Software.
It is imperative that you find a highly efficient email marketing software or application which can help you achieve your email marketing goals. You can try using the trial versions that some companies offer but you have to think about the long haul too. So make sure to secure a good budget for these software and applications.
- Design And Run Some Tests For Your Campaign.
Once you have identified your audience and purchased a good set of email marketing software, you can then begin designing and testing your campaign. Keep your overall marketing goals in mind when thinking about the perfect slogan, motto, or catchphrase. The message has to be short but highly effective. Once you’re done, you can proceed on identifying potential respondents to test the campaign with. This way, you’ll have an idea if your design can potentially bring in positive responses from future buyers.
- Set A Date And Timeline For The Campaign.
This is the part when you check your calendar and determine the schedule for your campaign. This is critical because you don’t want to be too late in promoting your products, like offering Christmas ornaments when Valentine’s Day is near already. Make sure to set a workable and definite schedule. Don’t forget to stick to it!
2. Production Stage
When you’re done with the pre-production stage, you can proceed with the production stage. A lot of work comes in here too so you better be ready. Check out some tips that can make the task really bearable for you:
- Segregate Your List.
The list that you came up with from pre-production stage will have to undergo segregation. Why is this done? This is primarily executed to erase contacts that may not be interested with your campaign anymore. You will avoid potentially irate customers if you do this properly.
- Set A Date And Timeline For The Campaign.
This is the part when you finally send those useful and helpful emails. Be prepared to alter or revise some of your wordings as you deem necessary for some respondents.
3. Post-Production Stage
Email marketing doesn’t ends after sending the emails. You need to monitor the results too. This is the only way for you to know if the campaign was successful or not. Below are some pointers for you:
- Respond To Emails Immediately.
Send timely replies to your respondents. This way, they will have an impression that they can expect great service from you and that you are attending closely to their needs. You can opt to be more casual when you reply to their emails.
- Develop An Alternate Plan
If you don’t have too many positive responses, you must have a backup plan. You need to create a system that will allow you to respond appropriately even to the most hateful of emails. Make sure to maintain professionalism at all times.
- Maintain Or Improve your email marketing strategy.
Once you are able to gauge if the campaign was effective or not, you need to either maintain or improve the strategy. Scrap ineffective techniques and maintain or develop the good ones.
Email marketing is not easy to do but if you’re diligent with your work, you’ll find that although it is challenging, it can be pretty rewarding too.
So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and develop an email marketing plan now!
Good Tips, but I think one of the main tenets was missed here. i.e. the strategy to build your list. If you don’t have a good list, above 3 tenets will not fall in place. So I think some tips regarding strategy to build list should also be discussed in this post.
A nice way to get your your email marketing going in the right way! 🙂
Production of your work (emails) have to be set up in ways and targeted exactly for each setup (pre, during, post).
You need to be highly efficient in getting your emails to the right people.
I would add in the production stage, on figuring exactly how your audience is reacting, and taking it from there.
Anyone who thinks they can just rifle a series of emails from the hip is a spammer. You have presented a great alternative. The ideas you present will, if followed, create relationships vital to your email marketing campaign.
Everybody knows the importance of Email Marketing, but if you can’t use it correctly then it can cause you huge loss plus make your negative image as well.
To be honest i never use email marketing method for website promotion, traffic and business but i know it is very keen and helpful source to get heavy traffic from targeted countries. Your points are very helpful to learn about email marketing briefly.
Nice points, topics you discussed are really important and i want to add one more point to the above. ” Time of sending the email ” for better results i recommend to send the email notifications on wednesday and thursday because on these days people will be more interested and will have free time to go with their emails and will spend a lot of time on the sites which they were landed so the marketing on these days will be high compared to the other days. And the conversion is also high on these days compared to the starting and ending of the week.
Nice tips, will be quite useful when I start email marketing campaign for my next startup. Hopefully my list of 12k subscribers will be quite handy at that point of time.
I’m looking at software as something that you can use to handle as many personalized emails as possible. But if you’re able to manage the people in your list without the use of software, then do so. The reason why something as “instant” as a software is used is because it’s a lot speedier than the usual. Oh, by the way. Good points.
Everything related to business must be taken seriously. Planning must be done first then comes the implementation process. A review of the process is also needed upon implementation in order to keep track if the project is right on track, if not, re-planning and anticipation of future problems are needed. Businesses include cycles that repeat over and over again. Without patience, you will get nowhere.
Great article Carlo! I liked very much that you paralleled the email marketing strategies to the production of a film! You made your point easier to understand! I also totally agree that a quick respond to the emails is very important because you show how much you care for their needs, as you said!
Thank you for sharing.