Small Business, Big Results—Lesson 1: Strategize For Success

Your strategy determines the keys to your program’s success.

You probably want to learn more about email marketing because you’ve heard that it can drive incredible ROI and lead to larger sales and greater lifetime value for customers.

Email can accomplish that and much more, but only when executed well.

If you want to see the mega results email is capable of, you’ll need to craft and send the kind of emails your subscribers want to receive.

And the first step to crafting those emails is outlining a solid strategy that not only helps your small business reach its goals, but one that also delivers the kind of quality content your ideal audience is looking for.

Where do you begin?

The first step in determining your email marketing strategy is deciding on a goal.

What do you want to accomplish with your email marketing?

Some common goals for email marketing are:

1. Driving revenue through increased sales and promotions.
2. Increasing your blog traffic and authority.
3. Nurturing leads through the sales funnel.
4. Educating current and prospective customers about your product or industry.
5. Creating a loyal following by implementing a VIP rewards program.

This list is far from comprehensive. Truthfully, if you can think up something you want to accomplish, there’s a way email can get you there.

Learn more about setting goals for your email marketing strategy here.

Your email marketing strategy can do many of these things at once, but be careful choosing goals when you’re first starting out.

It’s best to start small and then expand as you improve, instead of trying to do too much too fast. Much like running your small business.

After you decide on a goal, you’ll need to create a comprehensive strategy for reaching that goal.

So how do you create a comprehensive strategy?

1. Create a mission statement for your email program that clearly communicates your goals. Your mission statement should be very clear to you and to everyone else, outlining what the purpose of your email marketing is and, just as importantly, what it isn’t.
2. Set SMART objectives and track them. You’ll want the objectives for your email marketing to be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. Align your objectives with your mission statement and with what you want your subscribers to do, then set up ways to track performance against these objectives.
   But don’t get too focused on tracking and improving email-related metrics—such as opens and clicks—that you forget about the other metrics that drive your small business like conversions, average order value (AOV), total sales, and generated leads.
3. Develop a comprehensive contact plan by mapping out the order of the emails you want to send, your segmentation, and send cadence. These elements are the nuts and bolts of your email marketing strategy. You’ll need to think carefully about your ideal audience and how to provide value to them while moving them toward the action you want them to take (which will lead to you hitting your email marketing goals).
   If you aren’t sure how to begin creating your contact plan, don’t worry. Our future lessons will guide you! For now, it’s enough to start thinking about what a contact plan will look like as you lead a subscriber through the process of performing the desired action.

Once you know what you want to accomplish and how you plan to accomplish it, it’s time to start implementing these tactics. But before you can send any campaigns, you’ll need actual subscribers.

Learn more about creating your email strategy here.

That means growing a quality list of contacts who will become your small business’ best customers. That’s why our next lesson will go over how you can build a quality email list.

Today’s Challenge

One of the best ways to ensure you reach a goal is by sharing it with others. Tell us your email marketing goal(s) on Twitter using #SmallBusinessBigResults and tagging @Campaign.Monitor and we’ll share some of our favorites!

[Tweet “Sharing my goals for the #SmallBusinessBigResults email course with @Campaign.Monitor:” “Tweet it here.”]