Email Best Practices
Setting goals that will drive your email campaign through the roof
Set goals early on in your email campaigns to keep you on track and drive your ROI through the roof.
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The holiday season is just around the corner and that means it’s time to gear up and get your email marketing campaigns ready for the busiest quarter of the year in e-commerce. Not sure where to start? Here’s a tip: have a look at your goals and set specific targets to identify what exactly you want to achieve with your holiday campaigns. The holidays are a busy time, but before the panic starts to set in and you choke on your gingerbread latte, take a deep breath: Mailjet is here to help you set the right targets.
Setting your goals now will make it easier for you to develop a targeted campaign and makes it clear what kind of results you want to achieve. Goals will also make it easier to evaluate on your performance once the holidays are over since you will be able to compare the target you set to the actual results and thereby evaluate the success of your efforts. Here are a few tips to help you set goals that will drive your campaign through the chimney:
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1. Start broad, get specific
Your goals determine the purpose of your campaign - what exactly you want to achieve. Therefore, it’s important to be as specific as possible when setting them. Think about what the overall aim of your campaign is: to increase your open-rate? To increase your click-rate? To promote a special holiday discount?
Once you’ve established an overall purpose, break them down into specific measurable goals, the more targeted the better. If you have precise and measurable goals, it will be much easier to structure your campaign to meet those goals and in turn evaluate your results to understand how successful it was. For example, if your goal is to increase your click-rate, set a specific percentage you’re aiming to increase it by. Other goals you can consider for your campaign could be:
Increase open-rate by 15%
30% of subscribers use your holiday discount code
Increase traffic to a specific page by 50%
No two campaigns are alike though, so set goals that are relevant and important your business. In the process of establishing your goals, use the S.M.A.R.T. concept to guide you in the right direction and get your campaign off to a good start.
2. Identify key KPIs and track them closely
Previously on our blog, we’ve discussed which KPIs every email marketer should be measuring. Use these as a guideline for setting your own holiday campaign goals. Pin down the KPIs that are important and relevant to your campaign and follow them closely.
For email marketing, the common metrics to follow are open-rate, click-rate, unsubscribe rate and bounce rate. These should always be tracked to help you understand how well your message is getting across to your subscribes and how readers react to your creative.
But for your holiday campaigns, there will probably be additional figures that go beyond the standard email marketing KPIs you want to follow. You might have a holiday sale page on your website or offer a special discount code. In this case, your KPIs to track could be the number of visits to your holiday sale section, number of sales from these visits and number of times the discount code was used for a sale. Make sure that the results of each of your offers are measured closely so you can analyze the performance once your campaign has been concluded.
3. Learn from the results of your (Christmas) past
To put things into perspective and get inspiration for setting realistic and attainable goals, take a dive into your own historical data from previous holiday campaigns. Look at how your performance developed over the months leading up to the holidays to get an idea of the kind of KPI development to expect.
You can do this by creating benchmarks, which let you easily compare the results of former campaigns and can give you valuable input for setting new goals and understanding how the holiday season impacts your performance. For example, our campaign comparison feature gives you an overview of KPIs from your sent campaigns and lets you compare results and create benchmarks.
Analyze results of your holidays campaign from last year and raise the bar this year.
Keep the data from your previous campaigns in mind and set new goals the will blow old results out of the water! Defining your goals are key for determining the overall purpose of your campaign, for identifying the KPIs to be tracked and to use for evaluating the outcome and learn from your results.
It’s a crucial step in creating a successful email campaign, so be sure to put time and thought into the process. Hopefully our tips will help you set strong goals and send your campaign off towards great results this holiday season, jingling all the way.
