I think we can all agree that having goals is good.  It gives you something to shoot for; something to achieve that will likely stretch your limits and cause you to challenge yourself.  Setting smaller goals that are more easily attainable in order to build confidence and momentum can go a long way to the more lofty achievements.  And of course, your strategy is what helps you achieve those goals, so the two go hand in hand, so to speak.

Okay, let’s get down to what email marketing goals and strategies may look like.  It is important to have expectations for any email campaign, as well as a clear purpose for why the campaign is going out, but this is particularly important when you are just beginning or are emailing any list of individuals who do not know you, your company, or your message.  In large part, your goals will depend upon your purposes for the email campaign, and ultimately what strategy you employ to reach those goals.  For example:

Is the campaign for branding?
Are you sending your email campaign in order to generate awareness of and draw attention to your brand?  If so, your strategy might be to send a large volume of email, and to do this on a fairly regular basis.  Studies have shown that individuals are more likely to take some kind of action if they recognize a brand and are accustomed to seeing the name, logo, etc…  Of course, you must always be cognizant of over saturating your audience with email messages.

For a branding campaign, monitoring the email deliverability and the number of recipients who opened your email is important.  You can bet that if they opened it, they took a look at the content.  So, hopefully you had a clear, concise, and catchy message (more about email content here), with your name and/or logo readily visible.

Is your goal to drive traffic to your website?
Like a branding campaign, volume is key with any email campaign intended primarily to drive traffic to your website.  Also, like a branding campaign, deliverability and opens are important factors in analyzing the email campaign results, but here click-through’s are equally important.  If the goal is to make sure that the individuals see your website content, it is essential that they click on your email ad.  For this, your strategy must be a bit different.  The recipient must click for this campaign’s goal to be reached, so having a clear call to action is imperative.  A clear and large, “Visit our website to learn more!” is a good example.

Are you looking to get sign-up’s or to make sales?
A sign-up could be for anything: an email newsletter, a mailing list, a petition, etc…  Of course, a sale speaks for itself.  All of the other elements are important:  deliverability, click-through ratio, a clear call to action, but we’ve added a new piece of strategy into the equation.  Although the sale itself should take place on your website and NOT in your email ad, the strategy to drive the recipient to the website must be a bit different than in the case of simply driving traffic.  You want to offer the recipient a glimpse of what is available, so that when he or she reaches your site interest is piqued for that product or service.

For this particular email marketing campaign in which you are looking for the recipient to take action, a high volume mailing is likely not the best strategy right out of the gate.  This is where split-testing can be a very useful strategy as well.  You will want to do as much testing as possible to be sure that the most effective email ad, list, etc… is being utilized.  Ultimately, this is more easily quantifiable because you will be able to count those actions (sign-up’s or sales) to see how the campaign performed, but it is still important to look at every element.  If you receive a much higher number of opens on a particular test, but the number of clicks goes down, you know it’s time to look at the email ad.

It is important to note that with any of the goals mentioned above, a crucial part of your strategy must be your email list.  Targeting the correct audience is one of the most important ways to ensure that you are not wasting time and money emailing individuals who have no interest in your message.

In examining improved email deliverability last time, we discussed the importance of using seed emails, using a proven email template, and maintaining clean lists and IP’s.  If you missed the first part of this series, you can find it here.

This time, we’ll focus a bit more on the email itself, as well as keeping track of statistics.  So, on to the final four:

Use a combination of text and HTML
Most SPAM filters and content filters these days are very selective with regard to which emails get through.  Emails which are heavy on graphics often trigger these filters.  Does that mean that you can never send an email with images or other graphics?  No!  But, including a mixture of text and graphics/images will allow these filters to “see” the email’s text and having that text-to-image ratio will increase the likelihood of successful Inbox delivery.  Designing your email ad with images separate from text will also allow recipients whose email client automatically blocks images the ability to read the body of the email.

Watch for SPAM phrases
To go along with the point above, SPAM filters love to grab emails which include certain words or phrases which are commonly associated with SPAM.  Regardless of whether they are used in a From or Subject line, in the body of the email ad, or as text behind an image, if these words or phrases are in the email then the SPAM filters will find.  Your email ad will be on its way to the cyber dump.

For a list of words and phrases to avoid in email marketing please visit here.

Keep/Monitor stats/delivery reports
This is the best way to know how your email marketing campaigns are doing with regard to deliverability.  Of course, gauging response rates is very important as well, but unless you are carefully monitoring your analytics reports, you will never know the true response rates for your email marketing campaigns.  For example, suppose that you have mailed two campaigns asking recipients to sign up for your newsletter.  For each campaign, you have received 10 sign-ups.  You are disappointed because you needed 12 to make it feasible to continue with the email marketing campaign, so you are thinking of scrapping your email advertisement altogether and trying something new.  What if you discovered that you were only achieving 30% email deliverability because of the use of a few SPAM phrases?  What if you could get that deliverability percentage up to 70%?  What about 90%?  Closely studying your statistics and analytics will give you the information you need to improve your campaigns and achieve greater ROI for each email campaign.

Use an experienced and reputable email marketing service
There are a great many email marketing companies out there.  When interviewing (yes, you should interview and ask specific questions – it is your money!) a company for your email marketing campaigns, there are certain questions…  Do they offer any type of service guarantee?  Do they own the email deployment software or do they resell another company’s service?  These are a few of the questions you should ask.  A good email marketing company should have happy clients and a reputation of integrity.

For more on questions to ask, please visit here.