Building an Email Marketing Plan

Building a strategic marketing plan is a first step, but its key. The purpose is to define where you are, where you want to be and how you will get there. A strategic marketing plan acts as a roadmap and a beacon, keeping you on course. It acts as motivation, keeping your eye on the end results. It forces you to think things through and focus like a laser to reach your goal quickly and efficiently.

It doesnt matter whether youre doing email marketing, Internet marketing, traditional marketing or some combination of all three--you can use a strategic marketing plan as a guide. But the tools are different for the different types of marketing.

This article can help you create a strategic marketing plan for your email marketing. Just follow these steps to get your plan on paper, and then off the ground.

Step One: Audience
Make some educated generalizations about the people who are currently or likely to be online and likely to use your product. What can you say about their age, gender, education level, interests, buying habits, or other characteristics?

Use this information to shape your product presentation. But think in terms of your products unique features, says Debra Traverso of WriteDirections, a company that offers marketing copy writing teleclasses.

"Just as in personal relationships, you cant be everything to everybody in business either," Traverso says. "Instead, you have to position yourself with a certain market and make every effort of presentation in line with their traits and wants and buying habits."

Step Two: Objectives
Make a long list of all the desirable things that could happen when a member of your target audience reads your email. The best, of course, would be immediate purchases. But they could also forward it to their friends, save it for later, or they could go to your website for more information. Prioritize these, and use them as the calls to action for your email messages.

Step Three: Strategy and Tactics
How are you going to make your objectives happen? Choose the tools in your email marketing arsenal that will help you meet your goals. Are you going to steal business from a competitor? Try sending a discount offer to an opt-in list. Are you planning to educate your market about your industry? Perhaps an email newsletter would work best. Will you target a certain demographic? Try participating in associated discussion lists. Can you take advantage of an upcoming holiday season to generate sales? Then a targeted advertising blitz during a certain week might work best.

Step Four: Quantify Your Objectives
If you want to know if your campaign is a success, youll have to first decide what success means to you. One useful benchmark is the point at which you break even or begin to see a profit.

Step Five: Copy Writing
What makes you different from your competition? Your offer should focus on your strengths, with a call to action that is compelling enough to move your audience to action.

Traverso, a former journalist and marketing communication specialist, says that careful word choice and euphemisms can help position your company against better-established competition. For example, use the word "innovative" if the product is new, "talented" if you cant claim experience, and "reliable" if you cant present case studies.

Step Six: Schedule
Using a simple spreadsheet to represent the length of your campaign, list each of your tactics from step three under the weeks or months that they will be used. This lets you see, graphically, how the different elements of your campaign might overlap and interact.

For example, you might run an ad campaign followed by the launch of your monthly newsletter the following week, so you can include the new subscribers from the ad campaign. Or you might launch a new product with announcements to opt-in lists, strategic posts to newsgroups, and a press release, all sent during the same week to get maximum exposure.

Step Seven: Testing
Before using your whole database to measure the results of your campaign, try a few different versions, sent a few different ways, to see which gets the best results.

Step Eight: Measure
If you keep track of the results of different email marketing tactics, youll be able to easily refine as you go. Consider your response and sales objectives as a challenge: reach the first objectives you set, and then surpass them with the next effort, by changing the copy, enriching the offer or refining your database.

By integrating the tools of email marketing, and positioning these in the framework of an organized plan, your strategic email marketing plan becomes a valuable document that supports consistent improvement.

The email messages you send out may be the only communication with your target audience, and they can have a huge impact on your company image.

"You have to know what image you want to project to the world, because on the Internet, with every word you type, you are image-crafting--whether you realize it or not," says Traverso.

About the Author.

Shannon Kinnard is author of Marketing With E-Mail.

shannon@ideastation.com
www.ideastation.com