Add Email To Your Marketing Mix


If you are serious about adding email to your marketing mix, you should take email seriously enough to develop a plan for it. Too many organizations launch a half-baked email program and then are disappointed when it doesn't live up to expectations.

The plan does not have to be as long as War And Peace, but it must include a few key elements so that you can develop a focused, targeted, measurable program that gets results. At a minimum, here are the elements that Hoover ink recommends:

* Objectives

* Audience Definition

* Key Messages

* Format

* Tactics

* Timeline

* Budget

* Measurement

First, determine what is it that you want the email program to achieve from marketing and communications perspectives. Is this a newsletter designed for relationship management purposes, or is it a sales-oriented vehicle? Are you trying to build awareness, generate leads, increase web traffic, encourage loyalty, or close sales?

Next, you need to define audiences. Who are you trying to reach? What do you know about them from demographic and psychographic perspectives? Are you addressing multiple audiences? If so, do you need to segment your audiences and develop emails with different messages? How will each audience profit from our communications.

Now, what is it you want to say to each audience? What's the nature of the content? Will this include just editorial information or will it also contain some sales-oriented material?

Closely tied to messages is your format. Are you producing a newsletter with a lot of editorial material, or does it contain just brief snippets of information? Is it an announcement list, a discussion list, or just commercial messages? Think about your audiences as you develop the most appropriate format.

Your tactics section lays out tasks and who is responsible for them. What technology do you need? Do you have in-house email capabilities or should you use an application such as nTarget? How will you build and manage your list? How will you acquire new subscribers? Who will create content, design and distribute the email?

After you answer those questions, it's time to turn to your timeline. Develop a schedule for having your technology in place, building your list, creating content, designing and distributing the email. Determine if this will be a one-time mailing, or if it will recur on a weekly or monthly basis.

Your budget may help you answer many of the questions above. Small budgets may mean you complete a lot of the work in-house.

Finally, it's time to establish criteria for measuring the program. An awareness program may call for some baseline research so you'll know how you are doing. A relationship management program may measure customer retention. Increased click-through from your email to your website is also a measurable element. Sales-oriented programs might measure total sales from email, or incremental sales increases with individual customers.

No matter what your objective in using email, spend a little time cooking up a plan so your results won't be half-baked.


More Resources

Unable to open RSS Feed $XMLfilename with error HTTP ERROR: 404, exiting

More Email Marketing Information:

Related Articles

Yes, Please Do Come In, But Better Watch Your Step!
This little parody, and the comments that follow, were written nearly six years ago. In my opinion, they're even more appropriate now than they were then.
Autoresponder Services Improve Your Profits
Perhaps you, like me, have web hosting that includes, freeof any extra charge, unlimited autoresponders. That beingthe case, you might be inclined to balk at any suggestion to start paying for them.
What Is An Open Rate
Good thing in emarketing business today is that many people use email marketing as an item in their promotional activities. Many companies publish a company email newsletter in order to stay in touch with their clients and prospects and some other people only advertise in other email newsletters.
10 Terrific Ways To Enlarge Your Subscriber Base
1. Create a unique selling proposition (USP).
An Introduction to Auditing Your Email Audiences
Organisations such as the BPA have been providing auditing services for magazines and event audiences for many years. Providing advertisers with independent evidence that your audience are who you claim them to be is an effective point of differentiation and extremely helpful when selling your proposition to would-be advertisers.
Just Write an Email
How did you sell your last product? Imagine that I am a newbie writing you an e-mail after reading your ebook. How would you answer the question? I bet you could send me a 300 word reply in no time.
Sucking in Readers: Proven Ways to Increase Reader Interaction
You've probably heard this educational philosophy:Tell me, and I'll forget.Show me, and I may not remember.
New Realities for E-Mail Marketing
Spam e-mail is no longer the mild irritant it once was - it's clogging corporate networks and ISP mail servers and has become a real productivity drain, forcing corporate and consumer e-mail users to spend 20-30 minutes a day dealing with this deluge of junk! According to recent figures, unsolicited bulk e-mail now makes up to 36% of all e-mail, up from under 8% just over a year ago. And, what's worse, more and more legitimate e-mail is not getting through to recipients due to Spam filtering taking place via ISPs and/or corporate networks.
Email List Management
How do you get the most out of your list?We all know that a lot of marketing is done to a list but, say you have a sizable list. Now what?Once you have a list of any size built-up, you must start broadcasting to it.
Newsletter Template: Should You Use Them?
There is currently a huge demand online for newsletter templates. In fact, if you are a graphic designer looking for some new work to do, you should really think about creating some newsletter template and selling them on your site!Presently, most companies have there own website, that is not necessarily making them that much money, so they are trying to find other ways to increase there revenues online.
How Autoresponders Boost Sales By Up To 400%
Imagine going to bed and waking up in the morning to findthat you made sales while you slept - all because of yourautoresponder!What exactly is an autoresponder? An autoresponder is anautomated email program that responds to an incomingemail with a message written by you. The message can bewritten once and loaded in the autoresponder and forgottenabout.
10 Persuasive Triggers To Plug Into Your Ad
1. Most people want to win over others.
How NOT To Appear Like A Spammer
Unless you use the Internet only for surfing and never use your email address you've probably received something that is called spam.There are different definitions for spam but I will say that spam is unsolicited email commercial.
A Lesson In Email: The Money Is In The List... With The Back-End Sales
Firstly, back-end sales is eMail Marketing at its best, so for this to work you need to already have a list of customers that have bought from you before.The reason for this is because Back-end sales, are the ultimate way to realize the true 'life-time value' of your customers/list.
Paradigm Shift for the New World
In the business world, the primary focus is on selling products and generating sustainable and profitable income. In any organization, the results are dependent on the activity of the organization sales, the quality of the product and service as well as the approach to advertising and marketing.
How To Create An Irresistible Subject Line For Your Next E-mail Promotion
As I logged into my e-mail account, I clicked on the Bulk folder to check the latest newsletters. Most of the newsletters and mailing lists that I'm subscribing to, arrive in my Bulk folder.
Email Marketing: How Much is Too Much?
I have a special new email address. It's in addition to my primary email address and it's where I tell online marketers who want my business, to send their mailings.
The #1 Thing You Must Have Before Even Thinking About Building An Opt In Email List
It's not a website.It's a smart autoresponder and mailing list software.
Opt-In Email to Increase Website Traffic and Boost Online Sales
Sending messages and information to people who have given you permission to contact them is a great way to build the kind of relationships that will encourage a steady flow of traffic to your website..
Save Time By Creating Email Signature Templates
If you're like me, there are certain types of email that you send out regularly that follow a set form (client follow up notes, meeting notes, email article submission, etc). These can be irritating to have to recreate from scratch every time, but the tried and true method of creating a seperate document-file template, then sending that out as an attachment, may not always be appropriate.