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DQ News: The 3 Steps to Starting Your Email Marketing Off Right

Recently, Small Biz Bee posted 5 ways to bore your email marketing subscribers – what not to do. So the question is, what should you do to get results from your marketing emails?

The experts push for split testing and segmenting, and those are important – later. For now, if you only have a handful of subscribers and are still finalizing your initial set of messages, you need to start with the basics.

First, sight your goals

If you don’t have a clear destination, you’ll never get to it. Your message stream won’t be focused, your web forms may not match your follow ups and any inconsistencies may bruise your brand’s reputation.

“What are your goals?” is a broad, vague question. You may want to use these more focused questions to help you find your answers.

Once you’ve determined those goals at the end of a path ahead of you. What steps do you need to take to get there? List them out and scratch them off as you go. Stick to your path and eventually, you’ll get to your destination.

Then, decide how to track your progress

You can gather a whole lot of data on your campaign’s performance. Email service providers track opens, clicks, downloads and more, and Google Analytics provide even more depth.

In theory, this data shows you what to improve for better results in the future. But if you focus on all of it, you’ll be scrambling around tracking every upswing, downswing and flatline that appears, wasting energy instead of making decisive, effective improvements.

Instead, use those goals you’ve determined, you can figure out what you want to focus on tracking. This guide breaks it down.

This data can tell you a lot, especially if you have time to really break it down and make improvements based on the results you see, but it shouldn’t be your main focus – that should be somewhere else.

Focus your gaze on the people around you

It’s people who sign up for your emails, who buy from you, who link you up and talk you up when you wow them – or who, if you don’t impress, don’t.

So focus on them. If they reply to your email (you’re letting them, right?), respond. If customers ask for special treatment, give it to them (within reason).

If you have the time and manpower, link up with your supporters on Facebook or Twitter display your brand as more of a personality. (If not, focus on building relationships through email conversations.)

Once you get “there,” go further

That destination we mentioned earlier? I’ll tell you the secret to success. Don’t stop when you get there.

Reset your sights, perhaps on finding on ways to create emails efficiently or strategies to automate how your lists interact.

And by all means, make sure you go back to split test and segment.

Photo Credit: Biscarotte

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