A New Year's Revolution
by Dan Ogdon
With the stress of the Holidays behind us we all likely look to the New Year with a different attitude than many years before. Our businesses have changed. We’ve reengineered our services, rethought our strategies, reorganized our business environment and have learned a great deal from the year that has passed. Now is the time to look into the future as far as we are able to foresee growth and anticipate adversity in order to remain on a profitable path.
If you are able to think far enough ahead, you can plan to cut out the foreseeable roadblocks by putting in the time now. So what do I mean? You’ve likely mapped out your major marketing plans for the year or for at least the quarter, you know when your major events are taking place, you know you’d like to generate more leads and feed them to your sales team to follow up with the most qualified, etc. If you already know all this, schedule in some days before it is too late to think about your email marketing plan.
Planning Tips:
Count Down - Schedule email blasts to be delivered 45, 30, 15, 3 and 1 day before an event reminding and inviting attendees and 3 days after the event to gather valuable post-event feedback. Schedule an invitation timeline for all events.
Define Contacts – what is a lead to you, when is a lead worthy of a phone call from your sales team? Define your on-boarding process and tailor email blasts around each group. The results of these blasts will drive actionable sales tasks to your team. Knowing what to do with which groups is a huge time saver.
Blast from the Past – What worked last year? Take some time to review last year’s email blasts. What subject lines garnered strong open rates, what type of Call To Action, text links or banner links worked well? Don’t reinvent the wheel for every email blast – if it is working, stick with it.
Automate – As you are thinking about your marketing initiatives, think about the manual steps that could be removed – always checking to see who the new leads are, entering in the new attendees, determining who the hot leads are, delivering those leads to sales, etc. Use a system that does as much of that for you – have you heard of Swiftpage emarketing Drip Marketing?
With a little foresight and planning, it takes away from the last minute anxiety where you know you should send an email out, but don’t have the time. Think about it now; build it now; and when the time comes, you can focus on hosting a great event, closing more business, developing new partner relationships and ultimately gaining and satisfying more customers.
