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eMail Marketing Pre-Flight Checklist
By Peter Martin, President of Cactus Sky
For a successful company to grow, it needs well-defined business processes that are properly tested, highly integrated, and clearly documented. That way, new employees may be brought up to speed quickly while having the peace of mind that they are following the correct workflow, and, therefore, they are doing the job accurately.
Over time, as technology improves the processes must evolve to accommodate the changes. However, these changes must also be documented and incorporated into the business processes in order to ensure that the appropriate steps are being taken and tasks are being completed efficiently.
It is important for companies to refine and document tasks at all levels. Any job that is repeated daily, weekly, monthly, or annually should have its best practices identified and its workflow verified and recorded so organizations know they are working economically and proficiently.
One critical business process that is easily overlooked by many organizations is the pre-flight checklist for email marketing. By spending a few minutes reviewing a pre-flight checklist prior to sending out email campaigns, email marketers can ensure that their messages will be opened, read, and responded to favorably by their subscribers and target audiences. However, if this step is skipped, it could lead to disastrous results, including low deliverability, missing links and graphics, and high unsubscribe or reported spam rates.
CactusSky, an award winning provider of email marketing, has put together the following pre-flight checklist that organizations may use as a guide before sending out email campaigns. However, like every other business process, organizations must test each step and decide what works best for their company.
√ Have Goals been Clearly Defined?
Before marketers should even begin to write an email, they need to decide what they would like to accomplish with the campaign. Do they want to introduce a new product and drive customers to an Ecommerce site? Are they announcing a new feature and want subscribers to sign up for a product demo? Or do they want to increase brand awareness by sending out monthly newsletters to keep recipients informed on corporate news? Email marketing will accomplish all of these goals and more; however, each marketer must decide in advance what specific responses and goals they wish to achieve with each email campaign.
Email marketing goals should fit into an organization's overall business objectives. However, the goals must also align with previous performance rates from past email campaigns in order to remain reasonable and achievable. For example, if a previous email announcing the availability of a new product garnered a result of two percent of recipients purchasing the product, it is not logical to expect a similar email campaign to achieve a five percent conversion rate. Marketers should set incremental goals for each campaign and they should use targeted messaging to achieve these goals.
√ Are Logistics in Place so the Campaign may Succeed?
Often times, miscommunications in the work place may doom a campaign before it even begins. Marketers must work closely with the sales and product teams prior to a campaign launch to be sure all necessary logistics will be in place the day of the announcement so they can quickly and accurately respond to customers.
In order to plan accordingly, email marketers need to understand the way customers respond to messages. After an email campaign is sent, it is typical for 40-50 percent of all responses to take place in the first two hours. It is crucial for marketers to have everything in place to manage the amount of traffic that email campaigns generate. This includes scheduling the appropriate staff members to be available during the campaign launch, having the correct amount of inventory on hand to accommodate the expected response rates, ensuring websites and landing pages are updated and servers can handle the high increase in traffic the day of the launch, etc...
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