It’s been a long time since smart phone has become an essential tool to improve the quality of life in this connected world. In our hyperconnected society, the cellphone performs a direct channel between people and a bridge within enterprises and clients.

According to the Email Statistics Report, 2016-2020 of Radicati Group Inc, in 2017, there will be over 2.7 billion email users worldwide, and by the end of 2020 the number of email users worldwide will reach 3.0 billion. It is a significant potential market that makes professionals and companies think about finding the best practices to approach their customers using their email. However, for a successful email marketing campaign, you must define several aspects. Thereafter, I explain two of them:

Set Goals and Objectives

The goal is the purpose of your campaign, that means, what you want to accomplish exactly. The main goals of an email campaign are sales growth or branding improvement. Then, the campaign objectives are grouped in acquisition of new customers, engagement of an existing contacts, direct sales of a product and improvement of the company’s on-line reputation. For example :

  • Increase visits to the website by 30%.
  • Use of the promotional code by 20% of subscribers.
  • Downloads of a digital book.
  • Subscribe to a newsletter.

 

Define your target

When you think about your mailing list, you should consider the relevance of communications. In fact, customers are not comfortable receiving in their inbox unsolicited messages or not valuable information. If you do not consider that, you may be categorized as spam for either the user or the email client.

With regard to segmentation strategies, you can start for the data already shared by the client such as age, sex, demographic information and their interests. Likewise, you can categorize your customers according to the relation with your company: prospects, old customers, subscribers to your newsletter, etc. Additionally, you can include data about the behaviour and preferences of the client looking the information shared on the Internet. Finally, you can classify your contacts according to their interactions with your business: people who have visited your website, users who have commented on a social media post, or clients who haven’t opened your emails for the last 30 days.

The strategies for segmenting your target are endless. You can adapt them by the purpose of your email campaign to assure you to send the right message to the right person and increase the chances of success.

In short, you already know two of the most important steps to you start email marketing strategy. In a future post, I will explain how to develop a marketing campaign’s action plan and some tips for building an email list. Until then I suggest you start thinking about your goals and target for your next email campaign.