There are many critical components of a successful email marketing campaign. Businesses must develop strategies that are both diversified and focused to be effective.
One tactic that many marketers utilize is the newsletter. Newsletters can be a powerful means of keeping interested customers up to date regarding new products, services, discounts and others new developments within the company.
However, creating and maintaining a newsletter can be difficult. If the newsletter comes out too infrequently, it will have only a minimal impact on subscribers. It is equally detrimental for a firm to send out a newsletter that lacks sufficient substance.
That is why it is absolutely essential for organizations to pay sufficient attention to brainstorming and planning in email marketing.
Prepare for success
Econsultancy contributor Matthew Kelleher recently highlighted the importance of brainstorming. According to Kelleher, the marketing department should brainstorm not only among itself, but alongside anyone else in the organization with an interest in marketing who could potentially produce worthwhile suggestions and insights.
It is also critical, according to Kelleher, for marketers to ask themselves basic questions. For example, a publishing firm’s marketing department should consider what its subscribers want to read, and a retailer should focus on what products are generally more likely to be interested in.
These are very simplistic issues, to the point that they may go overlooked by marketers, who focus instead on more sophisticated nuanced strategies. But it is always valuable to keep the basics in mind, especially when it comes to brainstorming. After all, brainstorming requires a flexible mind in order to be effective. With a limited focus, potentially valuable insights and strategies will simply fail to materialize.
Take the time
In addition to remaining flexible and open to a variety of ideas when brainstorming for email marketing campaigns, it is also critical to simply allow sufficient time for the process. One of the biggest problems that email marketers encounter when working on newsletter campaigns is dearth of material to include. If a newsletter has no real, significant information, then a reader will feel like his or her time was wasted, and therefore will be less likely to open the next one. Yet delaying a newsletter until more content surfaces can make a company look unprofessional.
To avoid these fates, firms should spend plenty of time brainstorming creative ideas for newsletters and then planning out how best to implement these ideas in both the near and distant future.