<< Email Marketing Strategy: Planning your Budget and Getting Approval
Guard Against Hidden Costs
Before you can determine what your expenses will be, you must define what your strategy and goals are as this directly impacts the amount of money you will need. If you don’t define your strategy up front, you could be hit with unexpected expenses.
To begin, discuss your goals with your sales, marketing, and IT departments as it is important to have everyone on board from the very beginning. Decide how you are going to use email marketing to promote your business – will you send out a monthly newsletter containing corporate information or will you send out weekly emails announcing product promotions? Will you send every email to your entire list or will you target specific segments of your audience? What is your growth strategy? All of these factors have different costs associated with them, so to budget correctly, you must have a clear goal in mind.
For example, if you are going to send targeted emails, you will have to build a segmented database. This means that your IT department will have to build an opt-in form on your site to capture the information you require from your subscribers, such as title, location, age, and product preferences. Since this requires development time, it must be included in the marketing budget as a one time expense. You will also have to budget for all development time needed to integrate your email marketing software with any third party applications, such as CRM tools, analytics packages, etc. Knowing exactly what you want to do with your email marketing solution and working with your IT department on the front end will help you determine the exact costs needed to implement the solution and will assure that you do not go over budget for these expenses.
Another important factor to decide up front is the number of email campaigns you want to send per month and the number of subscribers you target per campaign. For budgeting purposes, you might want to start small with one or two email campaigns per month. Then, as you become more comfortable with it, you can increase your budget to accommodate for additional campaigns.
Also, if you are new to email marketing and you don’t already have your own opt-in list, you will need to decide how you are going to acquire subscribers. Although it could be tempting to purchase or rent a list, this practice can be risky as the subscribers haven’t opted-in to your list or requested to receive information from your company specifically. They could report your email as Spam, which will damage your reputation and cause deliverability issues on future campaigns. However, if you do decide to rent or purchase a list, be sure to have detailed price quotes so you may budget appropriately.
A much better practice is to grow your own permission based email list on your website. There are a number of online and offline tactics you can use to acquire subscribers. Online tactics are the primary drivers for acquisition tactics. Many of the visitors to your website will take advantage of a call to action button on your home page and sub-pages announcing the availability of email newsletters and they will sign up to receive special promotions and offers from you. Adding these buttons to your site should be quick and easy for the development team so the costs should be kept at a minimum.
Another online tactic is to build special landing pages linking to your online banner ads. While this will take some extra development time and costs to accomplish, it is a great way to build your subscriber list. Instead of landing on your home page or product page, the visitor will land on a well designed page offering them the option of signing up to receive your email campaigns, as well as the information they expected to view after clicking on your ad. Make the sign up process as quick and easy as possible and your subscriber list will grow in no time.
You may also consider acquiring subscribers offline. For example, use a bit of real estate on your print ads or direct mail pieces to let your audience know that you offer an email newsletter and print the URL. Or, print up cards with all of the information collected on your opt-in page and hand them out at trade shows and other corporate events. The cost to do this is low, but it may require some data entry time so be sure to budget for the time and materials.
