Planning is Key for Campaigns

• To run a successful email campaign, it is more important than ever before to carefully plan your email distribution prior to deployment. From deciding how many emails to send, to determining
  the correct days and times for deployment and using dynamic content and segmented databases to target specific groups and drive response, it is imperative to plan all of the details of the
  campaign in advance.
  
  
• Purpose: You must begin by deciding the purpose of your email. For example, do you want to drive sales of a new product, do you want to inform your contacts and subscribers about a break-through in your industry, or do you simply want your name and logo to remain in front of your subscribers? The reason for sending the message is as important as the message itself, and in order to create a successful campaign, you must clearly define the purpose of every message you send.
  
  
• Type: You must also decide the type of emails you want to create and deliver to your contacts, such as a monthly corporate newsletter or a weekly sales promotion for a specific product offering. Doing so allows you to organize like-emails into categories so it is easy to organize, assemble, deploy, and track the messages as a group.
  
  
• Goal: What call to action do you want your subscribers to take after reading your messages? Are you expecting them to contact a sales representative, download a white paper, or visit one of your stores? Knowing the goals in advance will help you create the correct messaging and set up your business for success.
  
  
• Audience: Is your message general enough to send to your entire list, or do you want to take a more targeted approach and build messages that reach a certain demographic of your audience? By defining your audience in advance, you will know what preferences to collect on the opt-in page on your website so you are sure to have the correct contact data.Content: Because email campaigns are similar messages that work together to achieve the same goal, the emails should have similar content. In some cases, parts of the content may even be identical to the content in other messages, such as a corporate overview or call to action. By planning the content of each message in advance, you will be able to write and save the recurring content in a dynamic content container so you only have to create it once, but you can reuse it as necessary. This will save you a lot of time when you are creating your messages.
  
  
• Creative Design: While the look of the emails does not have to be exactly the same, they should compliment and work with each other so the recipients know the emails are part of a series. For example, you can use the same template but include different graphics. Doing so will help your recipients identify your emails quickly, which will boost your read and conversion rates.
  
  
• Number of Messages: Marketers know that audiences must see or hear advertisements a minimum of three times before the message can be fully comprehended. While email marketers have an advantage as the recipients are already familiar with the products and services and they have requested to have the emails sent to them, some marketers suggest that you have to reach email recipients a minimum of seven times before they are ready to respond. Everyone that signs up for your email list isn’t going to make a purchase the first time you send them an email, so email marketers, just like marketers that use other media, such as TV, radio, print, or online advertising, need to keep the message in front of the audience until the time is right to purchase. When building email campaigns, it is important to set a number of email messages to associate with that campaign so the message is seen enough times by your audience so those that are interested have time to respond and take advantage of the offer, but the message changes enough so you are not constantly bombarding your audience with the same message over and over again.
  Deciding on the right number of email messages to send in advances will help you know when it’s time to write new creative and start a new campaign. However, it is important to suppress people from the mailing list who have already responded before sending additional messages.
  
  
• Deployment Schedule: The final and most important step of creating email campaigns is to set a deployment schedule before your first email is sent. This way, you can let your contacts know when to expect emails from you, which will strengthen and enhance your customer relationships. Using the tracking features discussed in the following section, you can determine the correct delivery schedule for your audience. While it might be tempting to email your recipients once a week, if you find that a large number of contacts opt-out of your list due to frequent messages or a high volume of emails, you can use this information to set the schedule of future campaigns that will be received more favorably.