Email Marketing Campaign

Your objectives are set out, so you know what you want to achieve. Now is the time to start thinking about how you are going to achieve them.

Ask yourself five key questions:

1. What is the budget you are willing to invest?
2. Who exactly is the audience?
3. Do you have a suitable database?
4. What part is email marketing going to play to help you reach this audience?
5. What resources do you have to support the campaign?

Budget will always shape any marketing campaign. Based on your objectives and thinking about return on investment (ROI), how much are you willing to invest in order to get results?

Research your audience as much as possible. Build a profile on them with details such as age, location, interests, spending habits, and even the newspaper or magazines that they read regularly. It's worth building up a detailed prospect list to come back to later when you have a specific product or service to sell. Knowing who the decision maker is will also be vital when setting the subject and tone of your campaign at the creative stage. Sometimes, we find it helpful to create 'personas' to help you understand the people you are trying to reach. Give each persona a name (ie. George, IT Director, married, 54, 3 teenage children, loves skiing in Les Arc.) This can often help you consider what they might think, what they do and help shape the campaign and channels with which you reach them.

If you don't already have a database of prospects or customers (and you don't have time to build one) don't worry, you could rent or buy one (more on this in section 4). So, what part is email marketing going to play in the campaign? Used properly email can undoubtedly be successful alone, but for maximum impact consider integrating it with other media or methods with a consistent brand and message. An example campaign could be:

	Stage 1	Stage 2	Stage 3
Campaign A	Email teaser	Direct mail	Email kicker
Campaign B	Direct mail	Email kicker	Telemarketing

If you have time, trying two methods alongside each other to a 'test database' helps you learn a lot about which language, tone and subject suits the different marketing methods.

Ensure that the response from the email takes the prospect to a suitable landing page, which synchronises with the campaign, and gives clear direction on what they should do next. It sounds obvious, but if you are sending out a large campaign ensure you have appropriate resources in place to deal with the new enquiries. It may be worth scheduling to broadcast over a few days or perhaps a few weeks.

Discover more about Objectives, Creative, Data, Broadcast and Evaluate.