Episode C.027 Email Campaign

Introduction
​This week we are continuing our series on Plan - Budget - Action. Regardless of your global location, the world's economy is coming out of the forced shutdown and will experience a V Shaped (quick contraction followed by a quick expansion) Recovery during the 3RD Quarter (July - August). The goal of IBGR's Programming is to get you ready to claw back as much of your lost revenue as possible.
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Show Objectives
Today's show is the culmination of Shows A.027 and B.027 and yet stands alone. Our focus today in the C Block is how to use email campaigns, one of several marketing tools, to not only achieve an end like getting subscribers, but to better understand who is interested in your offer.

Our view of the entire Marketing and Sales process is simple: Attract The Willing & Solve Their Problems. Marketing is the Attraction and the effectiveness of any email campaign helps answer the bigger question of "Who Are Attracting and Why?
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What You Need to Know

• Split Testing: never commit all of your campaign resources to an untested email or newsletter. This process is commonly referred to as A/B testing where you write 2 different emails to a sample of the target population and what the results;
• Story Telling vs Facts: all of the great books of history, especially religious, are all stories and parables that lead to truths. The same here - create a macro theme (story or narrative) that is the book and each email/newsletter is a chapter in the book. Insert facts to back of the story;
• Educate, Don't Sell: we are in period for permission marketing and selling. Instead of running hard with Specials, go soft with making your prospects smarter consumers of your products and services;
• Followup Power: make sure you spend serious time working on your Thank You and Welcome email after they sign up. You created a set of expectations in the campaign and this is where you start making it true;
• Avoid Looking Like Spam: stay away from anything that appears like spam - starting with using FREE in your subject line. You don't want their email program, like gMail, making your email as a "Promotion". You need to stay out of the spam filter is another reason to do split testing;
• The Critical Few - Subject Line & Links: this is real simple - people open emails where the subject is compelling and it has avoided the spam filter. Once the email is open confine the number of links to 1 location. You can mention it several times but just one link per email to make it easier to track. Also that discipline will keep your emails/newsletter shorter and to the point.

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What You Need to Do
Start with reviewing our show A.027 on an Email Budget for specific steps we use. This section will cover the higher order issues of interpreting the results.

• Always Split or A/B Test: conserve budget into 2 piles - the testing pile and the all in pile. Pull out a representative sample from your mail list and split into 2 small samples. Send out the A and B email/newsletter and track its performance;
• Tracking Performance: your 2  key metrics for any email campaign is Open Rate and Click Through. Open Rate is a measure of how effective. your subject line was avoiding spam filters and grabbing the recipients attention. Click Through measures how well compelling and clear the body of the email/newsletter to entice the recipient to click away to another location. What happens here has nothing to do with the campaign. The other measure you will collect is how many were delivered (quality of the email address) and how many have opted out (right population).
• Curate, Curate, Curate: constantly work over the list. It is smart to keep this list separate from your email provider (i.e. MailChimp)  so you can review it based on performance. I keep ours on a spreadsheet that allows me to break it down based on prior performance into subgroups. This allows us to target smaller and smaller microsegments with very defined messaging. This will drive up your conversation ratios because you are speaking to the individual, not the greater group.

Next Show: ​C.028 Social Media Campaign