The Email Wars

I had the pleasure of working with a client this week on an upcoming annual campaign we love to work on. I can’t delve too much into the overall details, but what did come to light was interesting. Since we work with 100s of clients on campaign email strategy to support a new site, campaign site or product/event launch we get to test so many ideas, subject lines and frequencies across all sorts of niches, brands and consumers. What I did not realize (at least it was not apparent to me until after the meeting) that there is a real science to the email campaign touch. It is not as much formulaic as it is learned skills. So it is hard to point an exact way for you to put it into action, but here are the things we evaluate and plan.

1. Time of Year: What are people doing right now and up until your campaign is over? Is is warm out? Are there some national or corporate holidays in the mix? Are there times that people are more frequently absent or on vacation? There are always factors of the time of year in play to consider. The Calendar and people’s behaviors around certain times of the year cam sometimes work against you.

2. The Timing: How long is your campaign and do you have a series of relevant actions, tasks or business objectives to achieve? Things like: visit, learn, vote, comment, buy, share, attend, register, contribute, etc. are all relevant actions to plan against. These set into motion a series of unique emails that you must design, write copy for and be clear as to the goal and desired action of the recipient. You must also consider how each touch and message fits together with the brand and the “campaign puzzle” you are building.

If I have a long campaign, I need to plan my touches in email as not to go to long nor to annoy with too many touches.

3. The Frequency: Am I arbitrarily picking dates for the sake of a number on the calendar? The client (from which this post was hatched) had dates like “the 1st, the 15th, the 19th, etc” and they had not taken the time to actually look at a calendar. Does that fall on a Monday? A Saturday or Sunday? And if so will the audience be willing to give you the attention and time you want them to? We report and read studies that show some times and days are better than others to message your subscriber base or audience. Have you looked over the last 6-12 months to see when they are responding, because your subscribers behavior might not match those of a study.

4. The Re-emailer: If you are going to have a series of events in an email campaign, what happens when you introduce the 2nd touch campaign to those that have not read, clicked or converted in the action path you want? Does this push up against a (I like a 72 hour window at a minimum) next touch planned campaign? As the 2nd touch campaign can often produce better results than the first in certain situations, you cannot forget to plan for this. If you have a 2nd touch that bumps up into the next one to all, you risk having multiple emails from your brand stacked up in an inbox that might not get read or checked all the often and you look pushy.

5. The Close: When you reach the end of campaign you need to drive the final copy that brings all the touches, whether they participated or not, to a boiling point and wrap it up. This message is one that might applaud, thank, award, grant access, show a final result or product or even drive them to continue with the next campaign idea. This is a time that you can use to move someone from a campaign to a customer.

These are just some primers to get you thinking about your campaigns and all the factors that got into planning. There are others based on the industry etc, but Iw ill save those for later.