An Email Marketing Campaign is one of the most effective means of communicating with an audience to drive business.

If you’re not already using email marketing, I strongly suggest you hop on this band wagon.

For those of you who are already engaging in email marketing, there are a few things to consider before you start blasting out emails. As with all marketing, you must first begin with an email marketing plan and strategy.

4 Key Factors to Plan a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

Here are four areas for digital marketers to consider as you plan out your email marketing campaigns:

1. Timing:

Deciding when to send out your emails is important. Sending out your emails at the right time will increase the likelihood that your emails will be opened and clicked. Essentially there is no exact time that will lead to successful email marketing campaign results all of the time, it all depends on a number of factors which are discussed below as well as some trial and error on your part. For example, if you test out different timing and find the best open and click rates for large deployments are every second Tuesday of each month at 10AM; our advice is that you use this “best time” as your default for your email marketing campaigns but realize that this could change over time and other important criteria will also impact your results.

2. Audience:

Sending your email marketing campaigns to the right audience is key. If you don’t send to the right people, not only will you waste their time, you will waste yours as well. Obtaining the right audience is always best if you do organic list building through web forms, trade shows, events, etc. It’s always best practice to include past customers, current customers and prospects as well. Keep in mind your lists and individual contacts should always have the appropriate CASL consent status as well as provide an audit trail. This capability is automatic and included within itracMarketer.

3. Content:

Content is king! The content you include in your campaigns should provide value to your audience, otherwise they will most likely unsubscribe after the first email. Knowing your audience and their interests is probably the most important factor when creating your email marketing campaigns. Get to the point and make the information descriptive, but concise. You audience does not want to read though a text heavy email in order to get to the message that is meaningful to them.

4. Context

Content maybe king but it is not really meaningful without context. Think about it; you can have the best content in the world but if your target audience has something or many other things than your topic on his or her mind then they are less likely to open and engage in your content. This is where marketing automation and one-to-one email messaging is at it’s best and really optimizes the likelihood that your content is really engaging to the intended audience. By using behavior based business rules and sending valuable content to individuals when they have your topic on the top of their mind then they are most likely to open and read your email. The right context is a combination of timing and relevancy.

All in all, there is no “one size fits all” solution to email marketing, but, if you follow these tips and have the right application to execute your campaigns, you will be successful.