Any discussion about decision making in email marketing will necessarily start with business goals.
Email Marketing is ultimately about growing a business, organization, or campaign. When we talk about marketing, we’re talking about the exchange of value typically between our companies and our customers. The company provides something of value (a product or service) and the customer pays for it.
While there are companies that solely rely on a static core group of customers, most need to continuously add to their customer base over time. This can only be accomplished via marketing and specifically email marketing.
The first thing about email marketing is understanding your business’s goals. This will then inform the strategies behind the email program.
Most companies grow in two ways:
- Getting more customers
- Getting existing customers to pay more.
Both require email outreach.
As an email marketer, the focus will be on email initiatives including newsletters and onboarding series. Most companies invest a lot in these vehicles in a bid to grow their subscriber lists. They also seek to provide the customer with immediate value.
But let’s say that the following year, leadership sees that a lot of your customers are churning. They’re not sticking around, growing into more expensive plans, or buying as much product. It’s time to focus on longer term engagement and retention.
Your decisions will need to change. You’ll need to focus on what kinds of campaigns you can create that will keep customers interested in your product. You’ll need to expose them to value that might be hidden in your service, features that will get them excited about sticking around and spending more money with you. It’s a very different challenge than the top-of-funnel stuff, and requires you to focus on different things.
You might need to invest in new tools to better understand your existing customers. You might need to focus more on your transactional emails, or working with your product or sales team to figure out what customers actually care about.
Sometimes, it’s easy to fall into the trap of going with industry trends. You can get quickly go out and begin to implement new techniques using email marketing. Far too often, that may mean over-focusing on what your business needs or what your customers actually need.
But that can affect focus and affect the way we strategize our email campaigns. When it comes to deciding what to focus on in email marketing, priority should be given to business goals rather than the “latest thing”.
