As mentioned in my previous post, if you want your email marketing campaign to be successful, first you need to know exactly what you are trying to accomplish by sending an email.
Below you will find some of the questions that you might want to answer when you decide to send an email:
- Is it an acquisition email or a retention email that you want to send?
Acquistion marketing is the fact to market to to those who are NOT existing customers. It can be your prospects for instance. The goal will be to add them as new clients/customers.
Retention marketing is the fact to market to your existing customer base, to customers that have already purchased from your company. Customer retention occurs when a customer is loyal to a company, brand, or to a specific product or service, expressing long-term commitment and refusing to purchase from competitors.
As you probably noticed, acquistion is very different from retention and therefore the messaging of your email and the strategy need to be different if you talk to a prospect or if you talk to an existing customer.
- If you want to send an acquistion email, what do you want to do?
There are different objectives for an acquisition email. Here are some of the questions you might want to answer:
- Are you trying to convert prospects into existing customers?
- Are you trying to send them an informative email to make them know your company and services better?
- Are you trying to follow up in relation to an action that they took on your website?
- If you want to send a retention email, what do you want to do?
When sending a retention email, keep in mind that you are talking to existing customers, therefore your objectives will be different than for an acquistion email.
- Are you trying to upsell your existing customers?
- Are you trying to crossell your existing customers?
- Are you trying to acquire new customers through your existing customers?
- Are you trying to increase their loyalty and customer engagement by sending them informative content such as a newsletter?
Once you know your objective, it is advise to put a forecast together. In relation to email campaign and if you are a beginner, I advise you to calculate your forecast based on industry standard at the start. Then when you will gather more data related to your email campaign, I will advise you to base your forecast on past email campaigns.
Setting up your clear objective will also help you better target your email campaign and therefore it will help you when you will be preparing your email list.
A forecast could look at the one below:
| Forecast | Actual | |
| Volume | 10000 | |
| Bounce rate | 3% | |
| Open rate | 27% | |
| Click through rate | 5% | |
| Opt out rate | 0.10% | |
| Conversion rate | 0.50% | |
| Net sales | $3500 | |
| Spending | $500 | |
| Return on investment | $1:$7 |
I will write another post at a later stage in relation to industry standard email metrics. Please note that for the example above, all figures are fake.
The net sales have been calculated by taking the volume multiplied by the conversion rate multiplied by the average order value ( this is in the case of you want to sell a product/service in an email).
The return on investment ( $1:$7 in this case), means that for every $1 that you invested, you get $7 back. It is calculated by divided your net sales by your spending.
Once the forecast prepared, keep it near you so that you can refer to it at the end of the email campaign and compare your forecast with your results.
