OK, you’’ve made the decision to get serious about email marketing and you might be asking yourself “Where do I start?”dscf7866

That is the right question.

Except you might be wondering which software is the BEST for deliverability, what template will work best for your industry, or what should you say in your newsletter.

But you’re getting WAY ahead of yourself.  You need to take a step back.

Way back.

And ask yourself this first important question.

“What do I want email marketing to do for my business?”

The way we look at it.  Email marketing is just a tool… a tactic if you will.

As such, that means that email marketing can be used for a wide variety of uses.

You can use email campaigns to:

  • increase customer loyalty
  • increase reorder rates
  • generate advertising revenue
  • generate leads
  • generate sales
  • sell out old inventory
  • fill events
  • pre-sell into a trade show
  • support customer service
  • launch new products
  • tackle reducing cart abandonments
  • support direct mail campaigns
  • lead or enhance social media campaigns
  • confirm transactions and shipping notices
  • deliver a monthly newsletter
  • create massive upsell revenue
  • convert leads to prospects to customers
  • support your sales team
  • solicit product development feedback
  • protect your blue-chip customers
  • run marketing or service surveys

See?

The list goes on and on.

That’s why to have to step back and create an email strategy.

It all starts with good strategy.  You really have to know what you want email to do for your company. This is the first place things break down. Mostly you don’t know what email is fully capable of and as a result you tend to under utilize this powerful channel.

Or you don’t even think about it and just setup a newsletter and then feel like email doesn’’t work for YOUR business.

Make sure email marketing is supportive of your overall business goals.  You want a campaign to do lead generation?  Good.  You want a campaign to increase customer loyalty?  Fine.  Just don’t try to make one email do both.

That’s one of the most common mistakes.  Looking at the world through the lens of the email.

When you’re looking at your email strategy, you’ll want to make email work for you in as many areas as possible and because you can’t make one email (like a newsletter) do EVERYTHING you have to make each email do one SPECIFIC thing.

Use this exercise to organize your email campaigns.

As these three questions each time you imagine creating an email campaign.

1.  Who is intended to get this email?

2.  How does this support my current marketing or business plans?

3.  What action do I want my readers to take?

Once you have a list of ALL the possible way you can use email (see examples above) you can examine each one by asking these three questions.

Soon you’ll find email DOES work for your business and you WILL get better results and you’ll probably find you are just scratching the surface of how to make the most effective use of email for your business.

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