If your Email Campaigns aren't working, here's the reason why:

Email, at a campaign level, requires more time and resources than you may expect.  It’s a simple process, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

If you want to have email campaign success you absolutely, positively need to do an email project plan (work scope).  There is no way around this.

How to do an
Email Campaign Project Plan.

There are four basic steps you should do first.

First, a situational analysis.

• Do you have a customer email list?  Is it segmented by customer type, purchase type? How are you harvesting your email names?  Is this a formal, disciplined process?
• What volume are we talking?  Are you managing a total list of less than 1,500 contacts?  More?
• What tools do you have?  Outlook or MS Outlook aren’t email campaign tools.  We’re talking MailChimp or Constant Contact.
• Do you have email automation?  Have you considered it?  Have  you measured the costs vs benefits?
• What kind of email campaigns are you doing now?  List them by type and time of year.  Do you have formal tracking and monitoring tools?

Next, resources

• Do you have a budget for each campaign? Is it adequate?  Or, is it just a number with no research behind it?
• Do you have dedicated people resources to create, produce, monitor, measure and report the campaign? Or is this a part-time responsibility for a company employee? Or, is this a “get to it when I have a free minute” kind of thing?
• Do you have a third-party (agency or vendor) who is responsible for creating content on a systematic basis?  Are you pleased with the results?  Or, are unhappy, but not enough to switch to a better alternative?  Is this a budget issue?
• Do  you have a means to realistically prepare budgets and ROI forecasts?

Do you know what success looks like?

• There are “typical email success rates” by industry which are helpful places to start.  They are not workable in specific cases, but at a campaign level they do provide some realistic expectations.  Do you have these measurements in-hand?
• Do you have your own goals and objectives, in writing?  Are they specific:
  • 5 email campaigns per month
  • 500 emails each
    Does each campaign incorporate unique website landing page?
  • Cost to produce each
  • Cost to send
  • Expected opening rate
  • Expected reply rate
  • Expected customer contacts
  • Planned follow-up email
  • How are the above monitored?
  • Who manages customer replies
  • Who is responsible for replying

Finally, what’s the email offer?

• What is your product or service?  How does it stand up against competitors?  Do customer’s find it easy to sign up?  Do customers find that it is clearly to their advantage?
• What is your bank end product support like?  If customers have problems, how fast is support?  Is support out-sourced to a third party?
• Is your email offering valuable to your customer?  Really?

The above is by no means an exhaustive list.  Think of it as the minimum project background you need to get done, before you can expect success.  People who avoid the planning and jump in, willy-nilly, are the same people who don’t believe in consulting a map before they take off for somewhere they’ve never been.  After all, they reason, how hard can it be?  When it comes to email campaigns, the answer is: it can me damned hard and a needless waste of time and treasury.

Find out what Email Campaign success looks like.

We can walk you thru Email Campaign project prep for free. 

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