Set Your Email Marketing Goals Before It’s Too Late
If you want to reach your email marketing goals, you first need to define them. Without clearly defined goals, it will be almost impossible to take your email marketing to the next level and achieve the results you want.
One of the biggest mistakes email marketers make is starting to send out emails without first setting goals. Sending out mass emails and hoping for the best is not a strategy – it is a recipe for disaster. Before you send out a single email, you need to take a step back and evaluate your goals.
Setting achievable goals is the only way to understand how your campaigns are really performing. Setting goals and evaluating your progress in meeting them will help you constantly improve your results.
Why Is Setting Goals So Important?
Having a goal to work toward will make you work harder and improve your results. If you do not know what you are trying to achieve, you will never be able to get the results you need.
Some email marketers are content to rely on industry benchmarks, but the most successful marketers understand the importance of setting their own goals. Industry benchmarks can be valuable as guidelines, but no benchmark is a substitute for setting – and meeting – your own self-imposed goals.
While it is important to set goals that are specific to your business, there are a number of things every email marketer should try to do. Here are a few goals you can start working on today.
- Grow Your List
The quality of your email list is critical to your success, and you should continually work to improve and grow your list of subscribers and customers. It is important to set specific goals for the growth of your list, i.e. increase the number of newsletter recipients by 20% this year or increase the percentage of visitors who sign up for your email list by 10%. Having a specific goal in mind will make tracking your progress easier.
- Increase Your Open Rate
Your carefully crafted emails will do you no good if they are never opened. Improving your open rate is a worthy goal whether you are running an online business or trying to get customers for your brick-and-mortar locations. Again, having a specific goal in mind will make assessing progress easier. Be as specific as possible and avoid vague goals, i.e. increase open rate by 10% is better than simply aiming for an increase.
- Improve Engagement
Every email you send should entice your recipients and make them glad to be part of your list. If you fail to engage with your audience, the result could be a rash of unsubscribe requests and unopened emails. If you want to improve your email marketing results, improving engagement with your target audience is a valuable goal. Reading – and rereading – every message you send can help you tailor and fine-tune your marketing campaigns and improve your results.
- Increase Orders and Sales
Whether your business exists solely online or in the brick-and-mortar world, increasing sales and getting orders is a vital goal. Whether you send a daily email message or a monthly newsletter, your goal is to gain customers and grow sales. Creating a specific sales goal is one of the best ways to stay motivated and improve your results. Set a lofty but still achievable goal – like increasing sales by 10% year over year. This will give you a goal to work toward and make tracking your progress easier.
- Build On Your Past Successes
If you have been doing email marketing for awhile, you have probably had your fair share of successes. Building on those past successes and making incremental improvements are both worthy goals. Think back on what worked in the past, then tweak your future messages to improve your results even more.
No matter what the context, setting goals is important. Goals give you something to work toward and provide a way to make you accountable. If you want to continuously improve your email marketing results, setting goals and working toward them tirelessly is the best way to get the success you are looking for.
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