Before starting anything, you need to make a full-proof plan. Similarly, the case goes with email marketing. An email marketing plan will help you to connect with the right people and relevant audience. MailPod – The top email marketing providers help you to make an effective Email Marketing Plan.
With this article, learn how to create a full-proof email marketing plan. A true email marketer knows the value of emails because they are very powerful in marketing. To fully utilize the worth of an email campaign, you need to plan effectively. Your efforts will bring happy results. How many of us know that we can earn more than 37 times what invested in emails.
Planning for email marketing is as important as other kinds of marketing.
Follow our simple step to effectively plan your business’s email marketing.
SMART
You plan for something you want to achieve. Therefore, before planning you have to set goals. Only after that, you can determine what steps you’ll be needing to follow to achieve that particular goal. Planning helps you to achieve your objectives with ease. Before writing something, you need to think about it. Similarly, before implementing something, you need to plan accurately. Follow the SMART concept to make your planning worthy.
S – Specific
Don’t make stories. Make specific plans to act wisely. Include the details like what goals to achieve and how to achieve them.
M – Measurable
Create goals that you can measure. Plan the metrics that are easily measurable and comparable. You can use checkpoints or numbers to create measurable goals.
A – Attainable
Your goals and plan should be according to what you can achieve. Don’t overvalue or undervalue your business. Make plans which you can easily achieve with your current budget and available time.
R – Realistic
The goals should be realistic. Do not make unachievable plans or hard to achieve. Challenges are good, but they should be in the reach. You can check historical data and industry trends to make realistic goals.
T – Time-Bound
There should be a specified time limit to achieve the goals. Do not act according to your will instead determine a time-frame and act according to it. Plan a date within which you have to act.
Make SMART goals to effectively implement your plans.
Related: Email Marketing Tips: Understanding Marketing Funnel And Strategies To Improve Email Marketing
Select the email marketing goals
Your actions should match the organizational objectives. Whatever you do in bits, it should always be in accordance with your overall business goals.
To make your planning process a bit easier, we present some goals you can think of to plan.
Reduce spam complaints
Marking your email spam is a way to tell ISPs that subscribers don’t want information from you, and that cannot be possible if they authentically subscribed for being in your mailing list. So, until you are honest with the subscribing process, you do not have to worry about spam marks. But we are presenting you with some ways to minimize the spam complaints.
Confirmation Emails
You have to send confirmation messages to the people who opt-in for your emails. Even if they signed up for your emails, you still have to confirm it by sending a confirmation message right away. Also, if you want to avoid blacklists and increase your deliverability, then sending a confirmation message is a must. MailPod provides the best email marketing services and creates an exciting confirmation message. We send follow-up emails and track the success of the email marketing campaign.
You need to customize your confirmation message so that subscribers know about the genuinity of the message. Also, if you have an existing subscribers list, you still have to ask for confirmation for the new purpose because they originally signed-up for anything else. To move your existing subscribers into a new list, you need their permission, and customization is the best way to get permission. You can take MailPod’s help to find creative ways to get subscribers to click on the confirmation link, whether they are existing subscribers or coming from the web. We provide the best email marketing services.
Remind subscribers about why they subscribed
Send subscribers a confirmation message disclosing the purpose of the email. Honesty is the Best Policy, and it will help you to build trust with your subscriber.
Subscribers may have forgotten about why they are in your existing email list, so remind them about their presence in your list and be transparent about your new purpose.
Entice subscribers to retain in your existing list as well as induce them to sign-up for a new list. For example, you offer 20% off exclusively to the existing customers, or you can offer some store credit points that will help them to get discounts in future purchases. In this way, you get your subscribers to confirm email newsletters and also get to use one of the authentic sales techniques.
Provide relevant details
Send only those information for what your subscribers have subscribed to. Avoid sending irrelevant information as it is the prominent reason of getting spam. You obviously don’t want to buy a thing that you don’t want. Similarly, your subscribers don’t want to know about everything. They are just happy with receiving information about what interests or excites them.
If you follow the above points, then you’ll be able to keep the spam complaints at a minimum.
Take feedbacks and improve
The best way to learn about your audience is to conduct surveys. In fact, surveys are very popular among the top email marketers. To know about changed taste and preference of the subscribers and to cope up with the latest trends, surveys help the email marketer or the businesses by providing the required information in time. Conducting regular surveys can lead to increased engagement, declined unsubscriptions, and improved sales which are beneficial for your email marketing campaign.
Pre-Launch Survey Email
Do you believe in “Sell what you can Make” or “Make what you can Sell”. Well if you believe in the former one, then this point is not for you. However, you can rethink your marketing technique as consumers prefer the later technique. Imagine you put tons of effort into creating a product but end up selling nothing as people do not want it. Do not worry, pre-launch surveys are here to help you. Learn about their current and future needs to create a product that will be sold in no time. Few things you need to consider when you create a Pre-Launch Survey:
- Be clear about how their feedback will be considered.
- Mention who you are and what you are trying to achieve by collecting their opinions.
Post-Purchase Survey
Your job is not done after selling. You have to keep track of your customers because existing customers are gold for any business. With the help of post-purchase surveys, you learn whether the customer is satisfied or not. In this survey, you can thank them for the purchase and answer some quick questions to improve if required. Now the question is how to entice customers to fill the survey? Well, you can offer some credit points or discounts for the next purchase. Many businesses use this technique to get their post-purchase survey filled in return for some credit points.
Points to be remembered while creating the post-purchase survey:
- Offer incentives to fill the survey
- Keep it short
- Ask questions about the particular product/service
Define your target audience and create your subscriber persona
Buyer persona seems exciting and helpful, right? Here are the few simple steps you need to follow if you want to create an accurate buyer persona for your business.
Research about Target Audience
Research is the best way to know about your audience’s interest and their minor details. Your persona will be more effective if your research work is of good quality. Find their current interest and anticipate future changes in their tastes and preferences. Start with knowing your existing customer base.
Spot the similarities between the customers who buy repeatedly from you. These observations will help you to target a more relevant audience.
If you want more detailed and personal research, then try meeting a customer with whom you like to do business or arrange a call. In this way, you can ask more follow-up questions based on their previous answers. This will strengthen your relationship with the best customer, and you get a clear picture of what you need to include in the buyer persona.
List of the Common Details
After research, you have to observe and write down the similarities you find between your buyers or subscribers’ answers. Now you have to decide what similarities are important and cannot be ignored. Find out the details that can affect your communication and narrow them down. It will help you to know whether the majority of people are facing the same problem or not.
You can categorize the audience on the basis of the following points. By these points, you will know much more about your customers and their needs.
- Behavior
- Demographics
- Interests and problems faced by them
- The time gap between two consecutive emails
- Create Multiple Personas
It is possible that after narrowing down the common details, it will be difficult to incorporate them into one persona. To resolve this issue, you can separate personas based on details. Identify the audience that are facing the same problems and segments them in a separate persona if required. For example, If you own a cloth shop, it is possible that some customers like trendy clothes, some may like traditional clothes, and some may like western clothes. Hence, you cannot mix three buyer persona and represent all the needs of a single buyer persona. You have to cater to different groups with a different buyer persona, and they will be easy to manage by different qualified persons.
MailPod – The top email marketing providers will launch many related articles on How you can effectively do email marketing, till then keep tuned and subscribe to Mailpod for the best email marketing tool, guidance, and management.
