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Step Three: Set Goals

Before you start contemplating design or content, outline your email marketing goals. Discuss your ideas with management and other stakeholders to obtain feedback and objective input. Would you like to strengthen brand awareness and increase website traffic, or do you want to reduce customer service calls by 35 percent, or increase sales by 60 percent? Do you expect 10 percent of your subscribers to respond or one percent?

It is important to remember that different email campaigns garner different results. You should not expect every email campaign to produce a 10 percent conversion rate or a 200 percent spike in website traffic. You must set new goals for each email based on the focus of that campaign.

To set accurate goals, you will need to review the sample data or results of previous email campaigns and set an incremental goal that is inline with those results. If the data does not exist, benchmark data from industry analysts such as Aberdeen, Gartner, or Forrester may be used to give you a high-level idea of what to expect. But it should only be used until you have your own data on your successes, failures, and testing history as these are the only benchmarks that are relevant to your business. Using your own data will help you know and understand your customers on an individualized basis so you will be able to craft more precise communications to influence their purchasing habits.

Setting realistic goals in advance will ensure that you have the right logistics in place, such as inventory, staff, and bandwidth, so you can efficiently handle customer response rates. After all, an email might successfully drive new customers to your website, but if the site crashes with the sudden response, the campaign will fail.