Email Campaign Goals That Work

Listen to the message

[powerpress]

Message Transcript
When running an email marketing campaign, you have to remember that email marketing is just like direct mail. You don’t see a lot of people excited about getting all that paper junk mail.

They’re even less excited about it on their computer. On their computer, people are working. They see your message as an interruption adding to the hundreds of messages they already get every day. So you have to make sure they don’t see you as a problem.

To do this, you have to set up campaign goals that work WITH and not AGAINST what people are doing when they’re at their computer.

What are people doing at their computer? They’re running their business. They’re solving problems:

• Receiving orders.
• Sending out proposals.
• Receiving invoices that need paying.
• Collecting project status.
• Learning how to be better at what they do.

If you can get your email campaign goals to somehow fit into that mode of thinking, your messages arrive with a better chance of being read so people respond.

Before I go any further, let me give you an example. Suppose you’re a realtor and you’re selling residential property. One approach is to send out emails featuring a nice piece of property just like you do in the paper.

But here’s the problem. It works in the paper because people there are looking for houses that are for sale. The ad in the paper gets you noticed and maybe even a phone call.

But your email arrives while I’m working on something else. The reader’s likely to be thinking, “Who needs this?”

Now what if instead of showing off a nice piece of property, you send an email with subject lines like:

• Housing Ideas for Shortening Your Daily Commute
• Reducing Expenses By Moving to a Home Office,
• Foreclosure Fixer Uppers for Young Professionals

and here’s my favorite

• DINK Housing Ideas for Growing Your Net Worth.

Your email still comes in as an interruption, but now you’ve sent something that might be seen as helpful. If you do it right, you start looking less like a sales person and more like an expert with information to share. People starting seeing you as someone they can call when they have a problem they need solved.

So let’s get back to goal setting.

Instead of our realtor having a email campaign goal like:

• To get a my next prospect so I can show him property and sell a home.

you should be thinking about goals like:

• To establish myself as an expert in South Florida real estate.
• To stay top of mind so when people need a realtor, they think to call me.
• To explain the different aspects of what I do so people think to refer me when they get requests from someone buying or selling a home.

I’ll share with you something that happened to me recently. I was working with a client on a project and they asked me if I could recommend a good photographer. They needed headshots and some office photos for the website I was building them. I gave them the contact information for a photographer I knew.

The only reason I remembered to refer him was because I had seen him a few weeks earlier after not having seen him in a long while. If I had gotten the request a month earlier, I would not have remembered him. Even though several people had recommended him, it had been too long since I had last seen him.

Now I’m not knocking this guy. He’s really good at promoting himself. But if he had run well-executed email campaign, he could have prevented me from forgetting him.

And I’m not recommending you bombard people with tons of email. It’s about sending a simple message once maybe twice a month, depending upon what you do, so you’re the one people think to call when they have a need for the products and service you offer.