Email marketing goals are crucial for your success.

You already know I’m all about email marketing. It’s one of the best ways to promote your business.

But many small businesses are still leery of using email. Either they only use email to send out an occasional greeting or they don’t use email at all because they themselves “hate” email and they don’t want their customers or prospects to hate them.

Well. I only have one thing to say about that.

Resistance is futile…

Email is here to stay and likely will become more important to marketers as they develop smarter automation methodologies within segmented lists. It’s all about monitoring the behavior of your lists and responding with appropriate messaging. 

But let’s put that aside for a moment and look at the top email marketing mistakes I see.

Whenever you use a marketing tactic, you must create a goal. You need to know exactly what you’re hoping to get out of this magic bus ride and it shouldn’t be “because everyone else is doing it.”

Here are some possible goals:

  • Upsell current customer list
  • Increase brand awareness to a prospect list
  • Announce new products and services to all lists
  • Share valuable information with all lists that will help them
  • Promote a specific marketing asset such as a white paper, special report, eBook, etc.
  • Invite them to a special event
  • Announce a new feature on your website, or a new service/product
  • Promote a special offer, limited time, or exclusive opportunity

Once you determine what your goal is, then you’ll be better equipped to know what type of message you want to send. Just like George Harrison sang, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there…”

For one client, we would alternate an eNewsletter with sales promotion emails. So the list would get an eNewsletter on the first and third Wednesday of the month and then a sales promotional email on the second and fourth Wednesday of the month.

View your email marketing as an experiment. Test different types of emails to see how they’re received. Study your lists to see if there is a certain group that is more interested in a particular topic than others on your list.

Consider creating a new list just for that topic and add the people who have shown interest. Then create customized content for them.

Email marketing is all about engagement. Discover what your audience wants to receive and then create the type of content that would appeal to them. Keep your content focused and on point. Your busy readers will thank you by giving you the most treasured “coin of the realm” around—their attention.

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