1. Visualize Yourself As Your Customer

Business owners and entrepreneurs like to just jump right in and get started, which is not a bad thing. While it’s crucial to success, it is important to prepare and plan with a set of objectives in mind. Take a step back, and be SMART by thinking through what you’re trying to accomplish. Try to see things through the eyes of your customer.

a. What information will attract attention and get people to engage with your creative?
b. Do I want my content to have a mix of expert advice as well as sales/marketing assets?
c. Should I include special deals, offers, seasonal promotions and/or coupons?
d. What kind of audience am I targeting? How do they respond to certain kinds of content?
e. What is my first level of engagement? A Lead? A Purchase?

2. Create A Email Marketing Plan

You’ve now established what your customer looks like, and now it’s time to organize your campaign(s) in an organic document. Look at your calendar, and plan out what days, times and seasons would best suit your campaign(s), and what changes to your content you’ll need to make.

a. Organize your schedule so that your advertising, expert topics and seasons all match up yet are varied enough that the user gets familiar with your brand/style, but not bored with your content.
b. Write down the tone of your campaign. Is it geared towards a one-on-one personal communication tone or a broadcasted “TV” style (or a hybrid depending on the day/season).
c. Define your Readers with the information you’ve decided on in #1.
d. Determine how you’ll gather your content, either personally or outsourced.
e. Define the frequency that you will contact your users. Be mindful of keeping things consistent so your customers expect their content, but not overwhelmingly frequent so that they’ll get tired of the barrage of content.

3. Create A Creative Template That Positively Reflects Your Brand.

SmartMail has many educational and dating templates at your disposal for you to use free-of-charge. For particular branded assets, ensure that they color corrected and sized for online-viewing. Our Super-Split A/B testing module is a very exciting tool for the modern marketer to discover which versions of their creative are the most effective. Random sample segments are use to test a number of different messages (creative include the subject line, from name as well as the body content), and how they perform to different demographical targets. This tool allows you to get instantaneous feedback on what works and what doesn’t and allow you to refine subsequent campaigns.

4. Start defining and building your email list

Good for you for getting this far, now you’re ready to build your customer email opt-in list. Opt-in signifies that your customers clearly understand that by signing up they are giving permission to you to communicate via email. This should be clearly stated on your sign-up page or whatever medium you are using to gather new addresses. Think of other information that you can use to help target your campaign such as:

a. If your business is a dating site, gather gender, age and preference information.
b. Ask your customers how frequently they would like correspondence from you.
c. Use opportunities to gather customer information using all forms of off-line correspondence such as paper form sign-ups or phone communications.

We hope you find this information helpful to your future email campaigns, and we look forward to helping drive new business.