Email Marketing: Establishing a process to organize thoughtful campaigns
As an Operations Manager, I believe it is vital to establish processes that ultimately work for you and benefit your team. So I get very excited when I find a new process that could help my team with their workloads.
The challenge I often face is, how do I implement and make this development a success?
As a marketer, have you ever found yourself passionate about showcasing the best practices you’ve learned in order to achieve your goal, only to realize there are countless steps and paths to take? Don’t worry. Take a deep breath; it happens to all of us.
At MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015 in Las Vegas, Courtney Eckerle, Managing Editor, MarketingSherpa, sat down with Tink Taylor, Founder and Chief Operating Officer, dotmailer, to discuss how email marketers can overcome the underlying challenges they may face by establishing processes to deal with the mountains of information at their disposal.
For instance, when outlining and creating email marketing campaigns, how can you condense the valuable content into something that will benefit customers?
Taylor discussed the struggle marketers face with spending a majority of their time gathering data and building the campaign while not spending the right amount time executing the plan properly.
In my role as an Operations Manager, I personally run into this exact challenge on a weekly basis. For example, when I am given a project to visually represent, I have all of the information at my fingertips but I will spend 75% of my time developing several visual concepts before realizing that I have not nearly spent enough time arranging the content for my team to interpret.
Below are three approaches Tink suggests for addressing these types of challenges:
1. Find ways to buy back your time
With the industry moving towards automation, this process ultimately creates more work to be done.
One question to ask yourself is: do you have the tools necessary to enable you to be efficient or do you need additional resources?
Personally I have researched project management tools and become overwhelmed with all of the products that were offered. Listing out your objectives can help ensure that you are able to access the value of the program that fits your needs.
Tink’s Recommendation: When selecting the right vendor for your company, get hands-on exposure to the tool early in the purchasing process. The right tool can help you leverage opportunities for your brand.
2. Create customer-centric focused campaigns
Customers should be considered first and foremost. Providing valuable information that your subscribers need and want is far more powerful than simply pushing what you want to sell them. This practice builds a solid customer rapport and ends with a lasting business relationship.
Tink’s recommendations for successful email marketing campaigns:
- Cultivated and relevant content
- A well-crafted design
- Segmenting your subscribers
3. Be vigilant of common errors
Email marketing has the potential to be successful if deployed properly. Small mistakes can usually be fixed fast and without any real harm, but they will detract from your overall message if you aren’t vigilant.
Tink’s recommends looking out for the following:
- Typos: Ensure that you have allocated time in the plan for content and copy editing.
- Subject line: Spend some time putting effort into your subject line; if not the rest of the email may not be seen. Don’t overhype the headline, but ensure that the rest of the email meets its expectations.
- Data segmentation: Make sure to apply your messages to your various segments. Think hard about your marketing cycle, what you’re sending and to whom.
Tink emphasized how processes do not just develop overnight even when one has the right tools. They take a lot of dedication, time and effort to arrange but, remember, if a mistake is made “stop, take a deep breath, understand what’s happened and then look at the damage limitation.”
We are all human and make mistakes, but how you bounce back from them determines how successful you can be.
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Take 15 minutes to complete the 2015 MarketingSherpa Marketing Practices Survey, and get a free pre-release copy of the August 2015 MarketingSherpa Consumer Purchase Preference Survey plus a chance to win a free, three-day ticket to MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 in Las Vegas OR an iPad Air 2. The deadline is September 28.
MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 — At the Bellagio in Las Vegas, February 22-24
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Categories: Email Marketing customer-centric, data, Email Marketing, email summit 2015
