As specialists in the field of marketing automation, it is easy to assume everyone is using email to communicate with prospects, customers and technology partners. When you stop and think about it, however, is that assumption really accurate? Are most businesses really using email – and using it effectively?
When a company is considering launching or revamping its email marketing strategy, there are tons of factors and variables to consider. In the interest of expediency (and keeping the post at a digestible length), we wanted to tackle our top 4 considerations: goal, budget, content and data quality.
• Goals. Determining the objective for your email marketing is crucial because that decision will likely shape the content, email design, and in many cases, budget. Are you trying to drive online sales, generate brand awareness and education or encourage demo sign-ups? Depending on the end-game goal, your emails and content can vary quite a bit. Additionally, without agreement on the objective, your executive team may have unrealistic expectations of ‘benchmark’ metrics or what quantifies a successful effort.
• Budget. While email marketing can be affordable, there are plenty of fixed and variable costs to consider. Fixed costs include the email service provider (ESP) or marketing automation platform. Variable costs cover: graphic design and coding, copy writing, follow-up emails, associated landing pages, promotional items or spiffs, data cleansing and list building, etc. As you can imagine, depending on how much is invested in the variable costs, email campaigns can range from hundreds of dollars to many thousands and beyond.
• Content. In order to cut through the noise of overcrowded inboxes, emails should be relevant and provide valuable content, depending on the audience and goal. If your resources are stretched thin, perform an audit of your current collateral. Case studies, press releases, blog posts, white papers and social media comments can easily be tweaked and repurposed for email campaigns.
• Data quality. Do you have clean, reliable data that can be used to generate the email distribution list(s)? The best design and content are practically meaningless if the data and lists are stale or of poor quality. Sometimes, it makes more sense to first develop a high-quality opt-in list before undertaking a major email initiative. The time and money spent generating the reliable data can pay huge dividends in the long run, in terms of response rates and actions.
By thinking about these considerations, your email campaigns can function as an efficient component of your overall marketing and demand generation strategy.
