How to Create a Lean Email Marketing Plan for Your Startup
A strategy is the foundation of any effective email marketing campaign. This crucial step gives campaigns definition, consistency, and structure. It helps you reach your marketing objectives and maintains your messaging on-topic.
The fact is, if done properly, email marketing is easy and quite profitable. The issue is that there is simply too much information available that can lead to confusion.
This is especially true for startups, when you're spending money quickly and need to turn around results right away. Fortunately, email marketing can benefit from the Lean Startup approach just as much.
In this blog, we’ve gathered the best tips to guide you in implementing an effective lean email marketing plan for your startup.
Defining Your Target Market
Serving your consumers better requires knowing them. As a business, you should keep in mind a core group of clients despite the fact that not all clients fit the same profile. In addition to streamlining your product selections, you can provide those clients with the best possible experience.
Defining your target market successfully requires research. Using statistics and other data from market research, you can gain a better understanding of your potential clients and their demands.
Recognize the driving forces behind your target market. What interests does your intended audience have? What hobbies do they have in their spare time?
Recognize the issues that your target market faces. What problems does your target market have? What problems must they resolve?
Identifying the Context of Your Campaigns
Different email marketing campaigns can be difficult to choose because they all differ. What is the frequency of your newsletter? Is it a good idea to notify customers about new products? What are the most important blog entries to share?
Decide which type of email campaign is right for your audience by researching the types of campaigns available. Customers and prospects can also sign up for only the emails that are relevant to them by setting up different lists based on the types of emails they receive.
Setting objectives and goals is easier when you consider the context of your campaign. When you establish your ideal end result, you will be able to develop an effective strategy based on your goals.With measurable, time-bound, and well-defined objectives, you can monitor the performance of your campaign and make adjustments as needed. By using specific and easy-to-measure markers, everyone involved in your email marketing campaign will be working towards the same goal.
Creating a Master Calendar for Your Campaigns
The key to reaching your target audience at the right time and providing your marketing team with the tools they need is an effective email marketing calendar.
In order to ensure that your marketing staff is always aware of what has to be done, you should keep your calendar updated frequently. Having one in place is also a terrific strategy for achieving your project management goals and maintaining organization!
You can create your own master calendar with an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheets and adding all the details in the file and sharing them with your team.
Among the details, your master calendar should include:
Campaign name
Email owner
Status of the campaign
Target email list/segment
Send time
If you’re not a fan of creating a master calendar from scratch, there are plenty of email marketing calendar templates over the internet. And the best part? They are mostly free! Like this one.
Measure Your Results
A successful email marketing strategy relies on tracking and evaluating its performance, building on what works, eliminating what doesn't, and making it the best it can be.
The measurement, evaluation, and analysis of a campaign should be woven into its design from the beginning. Measurability should be considered by marketers at every stage of the process. Identifying what KPIs will be most useful in evaluating ongoing performance and drawing insights from measurements is the first step to evaluating those metrics.
Here’s a list of the important metrics you should be looking out for:
Open Rate
Click-Through Rate
Unsubscribe Rate
Complaint Rate
Conversion rate
Bounce Rate
Forward/Share Rate
Campaign ROI
List Growth Rate
In Conclusion…
The success of an email campaign relies on a solid strategy. In order to develop a smart analytical and tactical marketing strategy, it is crucial to define clear goals and objectives. Your startup will be well on its way to a successful marketing plan with the help of these tips. Good luck!