For many of us, the New Year is the time that we take stock of our email campaigns and plan for the year ahead, as well as reviewing what we accomplished this year and what fell by the wayside, what went right and what went horribly wrong.

With January 1st just around the corner, what have you got planned for 2016? If mastering your email marketing campaigns is top of your resolutions list, let’s determine how the Pure360 Email Maturity Model could be your key to success for 2016.

Benchmarking

First and foremost, a Maturity Model provides you with an industry-led framework against which you can benchmark your own performance. This is designed not only to help you identify what level of sophistication you’ve achieved thus far, but also to give you valuable steps to help progress your email maturity. It’s important to recognise the level you should expect from yourself so you are best placed to compete with similar brands,

It’s important to recognise the level you should expect from yourself so you are best placed to compete with similar brands, however it would be a poor allocation of time and resource to strive to a level that is unachievable in your industry. By reaching an optimum and appropriate level of maturity for your industry and brand, you can maximise success and compete with the big guns using sophisticated, targeted email campaigns.

Structured Journey

New procedures are much easier to implement in structured steps. Have you heard of the old adage “eat the elephant one bite at a time”? The same applies to email marketing – conquer the pathway to success using pre-determined steps that won’t overwhelm you or take up vast reams of your limited time and resource. A structured journey can also be conveyed to the rest of your team so everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet and knows what your next move will be.

Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Goal Setting

If you’ve ever wistfully sat looking at the beautiful email campaigns landing in your inbox and wondered if you’ll ever reach those heady heights of sophistication, our Email Maturity Model is for you. Not only will it help you identify what you should (or shouldn’t) be doing, but it will allow you to set goals throughout the year that you can tick off one by one as they are achieved, as well as providing the aforementioned structured journey to ensure you actually get there!

Most New Year’s Resolutions fail because we don’t put a plan in place to allow us to achieve – you won’t make this mistake!

Identifying Missed Opportunities

Let 2016 be the year that no opportunity passes you by. If you recognise that you’ve adopted some bad habits (like a spray-and-pray approach to emailing) or are missing some vital opportunities, it’s time to put things right and stop letting these invaluable opportunities slip through your fingers.

Whilst there may be good reasons for why you haven’t adopted a wholly effective strategy as yet, putting together a plan for your 2016 email marketing can help you work methodically through the process to maximise success. A first step? Segmenting your lists and setting up appropriate automations which will produce valuable data for you to analyse and learn from. Keep testing your campaigns and analysing the results – one thing we know is that email marketing is constantly evolving and adapting so you really need to keep your finger on the pulse to see the benefits and maximise your ROI.

Improve Results

If you are a start-up business and do not have the luxury of past campaigns and established data to learn from, then use data from the competition that is readily available online.

The Email Maturity Model has pulled together data about your industry which will tell you valuable information regarding what your competitors are (or are not) doing. We know that retail and professional services are leading the way in sophisticated email marketing, but if your businesses is financial services or travel, you may be interested to identify how your campaigns stack up against your rivals and what strategies you can implement to help you reach the higher echelons of sophistication.

A final thought…

The New Year gives you a great opportunity to become more focused and productive during the year to come. If there’s one thing you should do in 2016, it’s mastering your email marketing strategy and planning your way to success.

Thankfully, we won’t leave you lost in the dark wondering what to do next, we’re here to help, so get in touch to find out how Pure360 could move your brand up the Maturity Model.

[mk_mini_callout title=”Download our new Email Maturity Benchmarking Report” button_text=”Download the report” button_url=”http://www.pure360.com/maturity-benchmarking-report-2015/”]Learn about email maturity and how it can benefit and transform your email marketing strategy[/mk_mini_callout]