Top 5 Essentials for Email Campaigns
by Karen Cha, Bethesda Emedia Marketing

Set Goals
What are you trying to achieve in your email marketing campaign? What is your objective? Is it to increase traffic? Work on sales? Nurture customer relationships? Build your brand? Make sure that you are clear about what your goals are. This way, you will be able to gather significant results from your campaign.

Understand your subscribers
Knowing your subscribers will allow you to create relevant and significant emails. By being able to create relevant emails, your emails will more likely becomes sales. You will be able to build profiles through your opt-in form as well as view their clicks and inactivities.

Target with segmentation
Instead of sending out catch-all emails, tailor your emails to groups of subscribers. You can create segmentations based on geography, demographics, and/or activity statuses. If you’re not sure how to segment your groups, ask them! Allow the customers to tell you what they want from you. Segmenting your subscribers will maintain specialized relevance and will allow better results in your measurements.

Call to action
This is your plan to inspire subscribers to act and how to act. Keep it clear, easy and prominent. Meaning, it should be clear as day what you are trying to tell your subscribers, as well as what you want them to do. Are you trying them to purchase or download something?

Analytics
Email marketing should be an ongoing process. You should have your own benchmarks and create trend sheets to assess what’s working, what’s not, and spot trends. Your metrics should include deliveries, bounces, clicks, opens, subscribers, and conversions. Make sure to archive all your results, even if they are not so good, so that you can learn from them and create new benchmarks to exceed the current ones.