How to create a Successful Email marketing

IDENTIFYING YOUR CAMPAIGN’S GOALS

Successful e-mail marketing boils down to a combination of old and new selling techniques. Traditional direct marketing principles make up the “old,” while the high-speed immediate access and interactivity of the Internet has created a few “new” rules. Throughout this and subsequent articles, we’ll weave both methods into the mix and explain how these principles apply to the steps we take on the way to developing our campaign.

Start by analyzing your long-term goals. Answer the following:

• Are you marketing to businesspeople or consumers (B2B or B2C)?

• In one year (or two years, or three . . .), how many new paying customers do you want to add? How many of those will be through the use of e-mail marketing?

• Through your traditional marketing outlets, how many prospects or leads do you typically need to promote in order to convert a prospect to a paying customer?

• How much revenue or what average order size do you want to generate per new paying customer?

• How much revenue do you want each new customer to bring in over the next three years? Five years? Ten years?

Your answers to the above questions will give you the preliminary figures that you need in order to start calculating what numbers you need to produce to meet your e-mail plan goals.

For instance, suppose you’re marketing educational software for children (B2C). In a year’s time, your goal is to add 1,000 new customers. If your average order is $45 per customer, that’s a grand projected total of $45,000 in new sales revenue over the course of the next year. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You’ve also determined through a lifetime value analysis (LTV) of your current customer base (see Part Four on retention for more information on how to calculate LTV) that those 1,000 new customers will likely purchase, in aggregate, approximately five times that amount ($225,000) over the next three years and eight times that amount ($360,000) over the next five years because of your customer development program, which includes cross-selling and up-selling efforts. Therefore, those 1,000 people are actually more “valuable” than they appear, at first glance. Fine. Now let’s take this projection a step further.

The industry standard for marketing venues says that you need to promote to 50 leads to make a sale, so a normal conversion rate is 2 percent. Here a “lead” is someone who has responded to your offer for a one-month trial download of one of your software products. Assume that your lead-to-sale conversion rate is approximately the same, or to err on the conservative side, assume it will be less. Therefore, to meet your goal of 1,000 new customers in the next year you need to generate 50,000 new leads during that time:

1,000 ÷ 2% = 50,000

How do you bring in 50,000 new leads with e-mail? Again, look at the bigger numbers and work backwards. Answer the following:

• What is the current industry average click-through rate (CTR) for consumer e-mail offers? (This will, most likely, be a range e.g., 5 to 15 percent so for the sake of generating reachable numbers use the middle portion of the range.) And, of course, if yours is a B2B offer and you have current statistics, use those numbers instead.

• What percentage of people who click through are expected to complete your call to action? In other words, how many will complete your form/ register/buy . . . or whatever your objective is.

So getting back to the children’s software example, you’ve determined that you are going to use a 10 percent click-through rate (CTR) to estimate the CTR for your e-mail efforts over the next year. However, not every single one of the 10 percent that clicks through will sign up for the free trial a percentage of them will not complete that final call to action. A good portion will complete the call to action for the trial, however, if it is a lead generation that has been properly executed. Suppose your CTR is 60 percent. Because you need to generate 50,000 leads, that means that 83,000 have to click through, which means that 830,000 people need to be e-mailed initially over your designated period of time.