By Tom Wozniak, Head of Marketing – published on Forbes on 5/3/22
More than 40 years have gone by and email marketing remains an incredibly popular and powerful marketing channel. Statistics show that over 80% of small businesses use email in their marketing programs, and with 4 billion email users worldwide, it’s no wonder the channel continues to drive results.
If you’re new to email marketing, it may seem like a daunting task to get started, but rolling out a new email marketing program doesn’t have to be an overly complicated process. Here are five tips for new email marketers who want to start taking advantage of the channel.
1. Determine your goals.
It’s easy to decide to start sending emails to customers. But, it’s important to determine what you want to accomplish with an email program and then figure out a strategy for achieving those goals. Otherwise, it’s like heading out on a road trip with no destination in mind. How do you even know when you get there?
Setting goals doesn’t need to be a huge undertaking. Start by asking yourself a couple of key questions:
• What do you want to achieve? Do you want to drive more sales? How about just staying top of mind for your email recipients? Do you want people to visit your website or download content? Whatever it is, there should be a reason for your email program to exist. And you can always change it later. Over time, an email program can grow to cover a wide range of purposes.
• How will you measure success? One of email marketing’s biggest advantages is that it is highly measurable. However, I have one word of caution: For years, the email open rate has been a metric that many marketers used to measure the success of their campaigns. That metric has always been imperfect for a variety of technical reasons, but in late 2021, Apple introduced a new feature into its email app called Mail Privacy Protection. Without getting into the technical weeds, the feature makes it much harder for marketers to track certain recipient interactions with the emails they receive, particularly whether they open an email. So, I highly recommend using a metric like clicks (and click rate) to measure campaign performance.
Use your answers to these questions to set up a basic strategy for your initial email program.
Read the rest at Forbes.
Tom Wozniak heads up Marketing and Communications for OPTIZMO Technologies.