5 Questions To Build Your Email Marketing Strategy

If you’re just starting an email newsletter campaign, or you’re reevaluating how you use email, there are 5 very simple questions you can ask to solidify your plan & give you the best chance of success.

1. What’s in it for you?
2. Who are your recipients?
3. What’s in it for your recipients?
4. What’s the time involved & how often?
5. How will you measure success?

Thinking of all of these questions together & the trade-offs between them will help you to understand why & how you want to use email, which gaps it bridges between you and your customers, and how you will know when you’re moving toward your goals…

Question 1. What’s in it for you?

Before you have any chance of success with email, you have to understand why you are doing it, where it fits into your wider goals & what you hope it can do for you. These could be SMART objectives (specific, measurable, aspirational, realistic, time-specific) that align closely to your wider objectives, but – more likely in the beginning – they’ll be broad ideas about where email fits into your overall strategy.

These could be very money-driven answers such as:

1. I want to keep customers coming back to my website
2. I want to turn visitors of my site into buyers of my products/services
3. I want to increase the amount my customers spend with me over time

Or they could be brand-driven:

1. We want to present ourselves as experts
2. We want to influence news & thinking in our field
3. We want to increase our share of mind

Or they could just be personal:

1. I want to help people
2. I want to be involved in an online dialogue around my chosen topic
3. I want to share my creative work

Question 2. Who are your recipients?

If you’re just staring out, how do you know who your recipients will be? This question is actually much easier than it sounds: If you can answer question 1 (‘why am I going to send these emails?’) then you know what your goals are. If you know what your goals are, you should be able to figure out what kind of recipients your emails need to get you there. For example – if you’re a DJ, you probably want to speak to club owners/promoters, other DJs, radio stations & your current fan-base.

Question 3. What’s in it for your recipients?

The biggest single error email marketers make is to forget that their recipients are signing up for a reason. Your recipients sign up because they have a need or a desire. If you don’t fulfill that, they will either A) unsubscribe; B) ignore your emails; C) click the ‘this is spam’ button in their email browser; D) think worse of you; E) all of the above!

Many e-commerce emails fall into this trap. If you sign up for an email from a carpet seller, you will receive emails with carpet special offers week after week. To the carpet salesman that makes sense “we sell carpets, therefore we will email these people offers on carpets”. That sounds sensible, right? Until you think about the recipient: Why would someone buy a carpet every week? The answer (999 times out of 1000) is that they wouldn’t. They might want news & resources about carpets, they might want to know what’s out there on the market, but your “Buy Now! Buy Now! Buy Now!” emails may be more likely to scare customers away than keep them buying.

Thinking about your recipients’ needs beforehand can reap major rewards.

For example, if you’re a car manufacturer & you know that your customers buy a car every 3 years, you may want to ask new subscribers the question “when did you purchase your current car?”. From that point you could send ‘pure informational’ emails each month, and then send out a second set of ‘come for a test drive’ emails to subscribers approaching the 3-year repurchase point.

Going back to the DJ example, we decided that a DJ might want to talk to club owners/promoters, record execs, their peers & their current fan-base. Realising that offers you the option of segmenting your emails, targetting a single group with emails, or figuring out a way of putting together a single regular email that will fulfill the needs of each group.

Question 4. How often will you send emails & how long will they take to put together?

This doesn’t have to be ‘once a week’ & ’3 hours’, it can be flexible, can be user-dependent, can be dynamic. For example:

1. We’ll automatically send an email every time we update the website. This will take no additional time.
2. We’ll send out a series of 7 emails to new customers 48-hours apart. This will have a one-time creative fee of $7000 and will take 3 hours to set up.
3. We’ll send out emails prior to recipients’ birthdays & holidays
4. We’ll send out one email to men each week & one email to women. The women’s email has to be manually built & takes a day. The men’s email is automatic & takes no additional time.

The important points here are:

1. Get the production time & frequency in tune with your goals
2. Get this in tune with your recipients needs/wants
3. Make sure you have the time/budget/content available to maintain this for as long as you require

These may need to change &, as with every aspect of email, it’s worth testing them as you move along, but setting them out from the start makes sure your plan is sustainable.

Question 5. How will you measure success?

This is the most important point: Without figuring out what ‘success’ means to you & how you will measure it, you cannot know whether you’re moving toward your goals, whether you’re making improvements, or whether it’s even worth continuing at all. It’s like working in a restaurant & ordering the same volume of ingredients every day without ever checking to see if you have any reservations.

A very, very basic scorecard could look something like this:

In the example scorecard chart above, let’s say you have an average order value of $100 & you’ve set the objective of earning $90k in a 12-month period through email (an objective that you can clearly measure against). You can both figure out whether you’re currently hitting that goal & figure out what you need to tweak to get there. From the example scorecard it looks like, with your current email content & frequency, you get an average of 1 sale per week for each 100 subscribers. That gives you a range of options:

1. Try to increase subscribers more rapidly in your target market (& then measure whether your profits still increase at 1 sale per week per 100 customers)
2. Trial different content to see whether it results in more sales
3. Increase/decrease frequency & measure the impact on your sales
4. Run a ‘refer a friend’ campaign to see if your current subscribers can refer
5. Add other product lines to your email to try & increase your average order value
6. …

None of these options would really be open to you without the measures you’ve put in place. And, without the measures, you would have no idea whether any trial tactics were paying off.

The most important elements to set out here are:

1. ‘Success’ is clearly defined & measurable
2. Your ‘success measures’ are closely related to your goals

For example, there’s little point in focussing solely on your ‘total subscribers’ as a blanket figure if you’re only really interested in ‘subscribers in switzerland’ or ‘radio DJs’. There’s little point focussing solely on short-term sales if you’re more interested in the long-term relationship between you & your recipients (where it might be better – for example – to tie in a regular ‘email satisfaction survey’ with your other metrics).

Further Resouces

• Email Labs – Email Marketing Best Practices (PDF)
• BeRelevant! – Tamara’s Email Marketing Best Practices Portal

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