Get your email marketing ready for the new year with these 4 tips. See what worked, what didn’t, and how you can improve your email strategy.
Phew, what a year!
I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels 2020 was quite the whirlwind. I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly looking forward to a fresh start.
The global pandemic brought about unforeseen challenges for small businesses — and many felt the impact on their marketing. In fact, of the 79% of marketers who have a content marketing plan, 70% adjusted their plan due to the global pandemic.
So as we look forward to a new beginning, reflecting on the year behind us can give us a lot of insight. Spend some time before the end of the year to take a step back and reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and what should change going into the New Year.
In this blog, I’ll walk you through how to evaluate your email marketing results and make changes in the New Year.
Don’t have an email marketing strategy in place? Pop on over to read how to create an effective email marketing strategy here before diving into this post.
4 steps to plan your email marketing
Step #1: Evaluate your goals
If you set goals going into 2020, now’s the time to evaluate whether you accomplished them.
Reflect back on the goals you set for yourself in 2020 and answer the following questions:
- Did email marketing help you grow your business?
- How much of an increase in sales did you see as a result of your email marketing?
- Did you build relationships with your subscribers? How?
- Did you grow your email list?
Use the answers to these questions to guide your SMART goals in 2021. This is a critical first step to plan your email marketing for the year ahead.
SMART stands for:
- Specific: Be exact when setting goals and expectations.
- Measurable: Make sure you set checkpoints to measure your progress.
- Achievable: You need to make sure your goal is ambitious, but attainable with your current budget, time, and skillset.
- Realistic: Your goal should be challenging, but within reach.
- Time-bound: Give yourself a due date to complete your goal.
Want to grow your list? A solid SMART goal could be the following: I want to grow my email list to 300 subscribers within the next 3 months.
Step #2: Analyze your ideal subscriber
Chances are you have a specific target audience you want to buy your products or services. We call that your ‘ideal subscriber’ or ‘persona.’
But marketing personas can change over time. Even if you had a defined persona to guide your email marketing, it may be time to look at whether that persona is still the best reflection of your ideal audience. Without an idea of who you’re marketing to, you can’t plan your email marketing to the best of your ability.
To evaluate your persona, consider the problem you’re solving in your email content, products, or services. Are you addressing their pain points? Who has joined your email list recently? Did anything major change for them in the past year?
It’s important to have a solid understanding of the person you want to target in your marketing. It will guide all your content creation and email marketing planning. – Read more
