You send out an email campaign. You get a good amount of opens. A good number of clicks. But, no orders. What went wrong?
Most of the time, when I ask people what their email campaign goal is they say "more orders", "to get specified", or "to be able to quote". And of course. These are your sales goals. But your email campaign goals can be different. They can help prospects move along the buyer's journey step-by-step.
If you just ask someone to place an order in an email, it's asking them to be at the end of the buyer's journey, when they're likely at the beginning.
Setting Barbour ABI Campaign Goals
There are three things to consider when setting a campaign goal for your Barbour ABI contacts.
- What would interest them (insights, expertise, shortcuts)
- Be valuable to my company (educate about products or services but in the context of a resource that’s helpful to your audience)
- Is able to be well-executed in a digital environment: email, landing page, website
Then everything in your campaign can drive towards this. And you have a more incremental but achievable goal. This way you can continue to build on consecutive successful campaigns and make the most of the valuable channel of email marketing.
Let's dig into this in more detail.
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1. Does it appeal to your audience?
The best way to make something worthwhile for your audience is to consider: is this helping them? Am I relieving them of stress, frustration, or work? Am I providing inspiration or insight?
You can do this through CPD’s, checklists, lookbooks, webinars, calculators, and special promotional services. These things are often free for you to offer. It just takes a bit of work to create it, but then you have a valuable resource that helps your audience. And getting your audience to engage with it is easier than getting them to place an order.
But will that lead to more sales?
2. Does it work towards your business objectives?
If someone finds your company genuinely helpful they will be more likely to place an order with you in the future. Also, the contacts who are at the later stages of the buyer's journey, either in the consideration or decision stages, now have your solution on the table. So even though you introduced yourself by promoting a helpful resource, it can easily transition to a conversation about your specific solution.
Also, when people spend time using the resources you've created, it's an investment in your brand. An investment of time. They're building affinity for your product as they engage with your resource.
3. Is it digitally deliverable?
When thinking about what type of resource to create - think about what would be most helpful to your audience. Then figure out how to create that in a digital environment. How can you use, email, landing pages, video, and other digital tools to create a resource that will be genuinely helpful to your audience?
It's also important to be aware of the limitations of email.
It can't answer all of your audience's questions, respond to their objections, and provide the technical information they'll need to make a decision about buying your product or service. This information should be hosted on your website. If you try and fit it in an email, no one will want to read the email, and it will get binned.
But what email can do is capture the attention and guide them somewhere else. Like a landing page created around one strong central message promoting your resource, and then to your website which is rich with the content they need make a decision.
When you've negotiated your audience's interests, company goals, and digital capabilities, you'll arrive at a good email marketing campaign goal. This goal is more incremental than "more orders" because it considers the buyer's interests first. It's also not too fluffy because it considers the business objectives of your organisation. And it's not unrealistic because it's considered the channel it will exist in.
Wrap up
Don't set yourself up for failure by setting unachievable goals. If your expectations are too high, you're likely to be disappointed, and not enthusiastic about engaging in the activity again. This would be a mistake because more business is happening online than ever before.
Businesses who don't bother to figure out how to build successful digital marketing campaigns, and attract and convert customers online, will see their share of referrals shrinking, as more aggressive companies move in on their market share.
Email marketing can work for you. You just need to have the right campaign goal. With a little bit of creativity, and a little bit of work we can figure this out and create winning email marketing campaigns together.
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