CommuniGator Making an email marketing plan
Making an email marketing plan Making a plan for your marketing sounds way more daunting than it needs to be. 4 simple steps will allow you to generate a structure for your marketing and allow you to organise your sends. For some perspective, email marketing has three times as many user accounts as Twitter and Facebook combined. Combined with social media, that impact is even greater. Define your readers Before you send anything you need to be aware of who your target audience is. How can you tailor your communications if you don t know the interests of those who are receiving them? Once you know who you are sending too, and what they find interesting, it ll be much easier to know what you want to say to them. Find out who is already subscribed and how they subscribed. Are they a customer, or did they just sign up for your newsletter? Knowing what their needs and interests are will allow you to see if you can begin to build up a picture of your target audience. Find what your specialist area is and what it means for the marketing you should provide. If you re a publisher or a blogger your subscribers are going to be interested in your written content. If you re a retailer, subscribers will want to know about your new products or how they can use products better that they ve already purchased from you. 2 Making an email marketing plan
Determine your content Don t just speak for the sake of it, make sure that you know what you want to say and what you need to say. This is your time to shine, think about what your audience want to know from you, and then focus on delivering that to them. Some handy pointers to keep in mind: 1. What made the recipient sign up and what was it they were expecting to receive? 2. Keep a content list - Upcoming events - News coverage - Recaps/Photos from past events - Latest developments - Popular posts on Twitter/Facebook/Blog - New products 3. Your content is the most important part of your newsletters Treat your readers like VIPs People have chosen to follow your brand, to thank them make them feel special, give subscribers exclusive benefits, things like access to your latest news and offers. Keep it useful Think about emails you would like to read, and compare them to the ones you would immediately delete. Don t create content that people are going to open and then delete straight away or unsubscribe from. Provide them with something they didn t have before whether that is information, product offer, or even a funny anecdote. Have a personality No one wants to read a bland and boring newsletter that drones on. Chances are; subscribers signed up to you newsletter because they liked your tone, brand image or what you have to offer. So make your emails interesting, inject a bit of character and a sense of humour. Stand out, be unique and be that email that your audience look forward to receiving. Keep it short A long email is likely to discourage people from paying attention, paragraph upon paragraph of text is going to be too much to digest. It hides the core message that is being presented. If you do have more to say, provide a link to the rest of the article giving readers the option to find out more. Get inspired Use the internet and apps such as; Pinterest and Instagram to scan for inspiration and to create new ideas to go in to your emails. CommuniGator Ltd 3
Determine your sending frequency and goals You need to decide how frequently you wish to send your email communications to your audience. Companies have many different techniques, there is no concrete right or wrong answer, but remember the sheer amount of emails your recipients receive every day. Daily, weekly, monthly, it depends on your business, your audience and the amount of valuable content you can deliver. Set out what you plan to achieve from your campaigns. Do you want to drive traffic to your website, promote sales or create more interest in events? Setting goals means you can monitor progress and see your levels of return on investment. Make a schedule 3 days before Brainstorm a few ideas of what content you want to include, topics for your newsletter etc. The nature of your business will influence the frequency you want or need to send emails. Although, the regularity may vary, creating a timeline is extremely helpful as it allows you to have targets to work for and to find a working structure for your communications. Your schedule will vary according to content, frequency of send, industry, etc, but knowing when you want to send your email and the time is takes to follow all the necessary procedures will massively reduce your stress levels. Here s an example of ours: 2 days before Create the content, write what you want to say about each topic, make sure you have the photo s you want to use and save somewhere safe. 1 day before Pull your audience into CommuniGator and create your campaign. Send a test to a few other people in the office to proof read, check that all the links are working and going to the right place. Initiation day! Now that you ve created your campaign, uploaded your audience and have done all your testing, you can click onto that daunting button to send. 4 Making an email marketing plan
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About CommuniGator CommuniGator is one of the leading marketing automation software providers in the UK. Established in 2005, we ve gone through a period of evolution as the marketing landscape has changed. The core platform functionality caters to email marketing with automated welcome series, a HTML editor for designing your emails, templates, responsive design, dynamic groups based on behaviour, integration with the leading CRM platforms, an event management suite, robust reporting and so the list goes on. On the marketing automation side we re able to track prospect activity across the web pages they visit on your website and the email content they consume and take action against. This means you can build up a really detailed profile of who has done what. To read all the juicy details of what the platform offers and how we can help your business jump on over to our website: www.communigator.co.uk Give us a call: +44 (0)1483 411 911 This document and it s contents are proprietary to CommuniGator or its licensors. No part of this document may be copied, reproduced or transmitted to any third party in any form without CommuniGator s prior written consent. Our products and services include: MarketingAutomation I GatorMail I GatorLeads I GatorEvents I GatorDocs GatorSurvey I GatorSocial I GatorData I CRM Integration I Managed Services