January is upon us, so if you’re feeling motivated to make the most of your New Year, indulge us while we give you five top tips to kick start your email marketing for 2016. From campaign analysis to timetables and more, let’s see what email resolutions you could make to ensure your email marketing campaigns are a rousing success.
Step 1: Learn from your mistakes
If your past campaigns were more fizzle than firework, it’s time to look over what went wrong. Whilst learning from your mistakes is something that you should be doing anyway, make it a resolution to always de-brief your team after a campaign to identify what content was popular, what wasn’t and what made you money. If there was a link that failed to draw any clicks or maybe an image that didn’t appear properly, you need to know what went wrong in order to produce slicker and more creative campaigns. For advice on recovering from email marketing mistakes, have a look at this.
Step 2: Analyse your data
This particular resolution goes hand-in-hand with the above. Your campaign analysis and data insights complement each other and these two resolutions should be implemented simultaneously. To say that understanding of your data is important is an understatement. Data analysis can give you a more meaningful insight into your customers and the way they think, it can also help guide your critical decisions, improve your future performance and customer service. Ignoring your data would be a colossal mistake – so check out our data guide!
Step 3: Plan your email marketing timetable
Proper planning prevents poor performance. Whether you are a small business or a large corporation, a well-thought out, properly constructed timetable is critical for ensuring all members of your team know what they are doing, what the business is doing and what the plans are for the future. By putting it down on paper, everyone is aware what campaigns are coming up and they can prepare their own ideas ready for team meetings.
Learn from past campaigns, looks at what competitors are doing and keep an eye on industry leaders for inspiration. Whether you are a local or national company, everyone can aim higher, create compelling content and successful newsletters.
Step 4: Never let a data capture opportunity pass you by
Look at how and where you currently capture customer data – can you improve your data capture methods and, better yet, can you implement a strategy to capture even more data? Do your staff have problems capturing this data? If so, use this opportunity to try different campaigns or utilise other opportunities and segment your audience by learning more about what they want and where they are in their buying journey. Don’t be annoying, the best industry leaders in data gathering plan to ask for information over a period of time using multistage forms.
Step 5: Images, graphics and animated content
When was the last time you invested in new imagery? Are your images tired, overused, irrelevant or all three? Revive your marketing campaigns and impress your customers with imagery that clearly defines your brand identity and is relevant to your chosen content. A clear image is vital to capturing a customers interest and getting you that extra click! Look through past campaigns and other platforms to see which images got the best clicks. Think about why they got the best results as it may be the content, offer or just an emotive image that pulled on customers heart strings.
If you have not stepped into the realms of animated content yet – do your research and dip your toes into the animation water by sending a simple thank you offer email which is split tested with both a static and an animated image- then see what happens with your A/B test analysis.
So there you have it! In 5 simple steps, you can transform your email marketing campaigns, structure your business year ahead and motivate your team to get their creative juices flowing. If you work through the steps we’ve listed, you’ll be looking at a customer focused and very fruitful year ahead which will provide a valuable stepping stone to continued success. Find out more about campaign strategies by visiting our most popular webinars here.