Structuring Email Campaigns

The veracity of the effectiveness of email marketing as a marketing technique cannot be underscored in any way. However, despite the multitude of benefits that email marketing provides, there are many online entrepreneurs in the world that state that email marketing is overrated.

The big question then is why do so many people swear by the technique of email marketing, while others completely negate its effects? Where does the discrepancy lie? The discrepancy lies in the implementation of the technique in the real world.

In other words, how effective the technique of email marketing will be for you would depend entirely on how well you are able to implement it. In order to benefit from the concept of email marketing, its various components need to be considered carefully. For instance, a lot of email marketing beginners believe that automated repetition will get them the results they so crave for their business.

Unfortunately, while automation is a characteristic of email marketing, it is nothing by itself. Reliance on automation without tempering it with strategy means that energy, money, resources, and time are all being wasted. Consider the following statistics pertaining to email marketing that should elucidate everything already mentioned.

1. Just under a quarter of email marketers on the internet do not follow a predefined strategy for handling the frequency at which they send their emails.
2. Almost half of the people implementing email marketing do so without following any documented theories or formal concepts.
3. Despite being entrepreneurs, people using email marketing fail to assess their returns on investment in terms of this technique.

As is evident from the aforementioned information, an email marketing campaign would not show the results that it can if it is not implemented in a strategic and synergistic manner. Fortunately, strategizing your email marketing campaign should not be that difficult a task. Consider the following guide.

Define Your Intangible Objectives

An email marketing campaign can be used for a wide variety of purposes. In fact, it is one of the most flexible, adaptable, and versatile marketing techniques you will find on the internet or offline. While this is the biggest strength of the concept of email marketing, it can also become its biggest weakness.

For instance, as there are so many different ways through which email marketing can be used, the chances of online entrepreneurs and administrators choosing the wrong way are higher. Effectively, the most common reason why email marketing campaigns fail is that their managers are unsure of what they want to achieve.

Therefore, the first and most important step of email marketing is to define what you want to achieve from it. Only after you have pinpointed your intangible objectives would you be able to use email marketing properly. Here are some things you can use email marketing for.

1. Drive traffic to your website
2. Create awareness about your products and services
3. Promote events and inform people of your business’s activities
4. Improve the reputation of your business and create brand recall
5. Generate leads that you can work to improve your sales and profits

Translate Your Intangible Objectives to Tangible Goals

The next step in using email marketing is for you to translate your chosen intangible objectives into practical and tangible goals. For instance, if you want to use email marketing to drive traffic to your website then your tangible goals would gain a certain percentage of increase in traffic or even a certain number of click through traffic from your email messages.

Similarly, generating leads through email marketing should be based on conversion rates i.e. leads becoming buyers. It is always best to start small and gradually go big in terms of your tangible targets because this would not only create a steady organic growth for your business but also allow you to learn the best ways of implementing email marketing with respect to your specific business.

Allocate Budget to Various Targets

After the second step, you should have a strategy for implementing email marketing. However, this strategy needs to be balanced in terms of the amount of outlay your business is capable of.

Effectively, you would be allocating budget to individual aspects of your email marketing campaign to get the best results. It is possible that you may need to revisit the first two steps so as to cope with your financial limitations.