Email Marketing Objectives

The first stage in any marketing campaign is to decide on your objectives. What exactly would you like to achieve? What is success? We advise setting specific and achievable objectives to give you something clear to measure the campaign against later. Rather than aiming to increase sales, decide the percentage increase you want to achieve or instead of hoping to sell more to existing customers set a goal of 5%, 10% or even a 50% increase.

Objectives form the foundation of your campaign. Everything you do after this point will be determined by them: your budget, the copy, the design and your choice of database will work around the objectives. Like any foundation it will need to be well constructed to carry the weight of the campaign.

There are four ways in which email marketing can be used:

1. Customer Acquisition. This is what most people perceive email marketing to be all about. Yes, email can be a great tool to increase your customer base. But this is by no means the only way it can be used and it will work even better as part of an integrated or cross media campaign.

2. Customer Retention. Rather than just doing the hard sell, make an effort to entertain and be informative with your emails. People will be much more interested in receiving them and if you get the balance right the sales will come.

3. Brand Building. In reality, every communication should be viewed as a brand communication. Some stimulate short and medium-term and sometimes long-term return but each should be intended to encourage people to experience the brand.

4. Cross Selling. Bring your full range of products or services to the attention of those who have previously bought from you before.  Objectives could be set out from just one of these areas or a campaign strategy might look to achieve goals in a combination of areas. Remember; be as specific as possible with your objectives as this will give you something to measure your campaign against later. In our experience, weak objectives result in weak campaigns.

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