Better performance through effective campaign organization and planning.
Before launching your campaign, take a few moments to jot down the essential aspects -even if you'll be running it single-handedly from start to finish.
Send this brief to campaign participants, whether in the content-gathering, design, mail-out phase, or post-campaign analysis.
Email campaign production cycle:
List Your Campaign Goals
Listing goals is not necessarily a simple task! To help, it’s a good idea to place your customer at the heart of all your intentions. Let’s go back to the previous chapter. Ideally, you’ll choose one main goal for one campaign, perhaps with one or two secondary objectives.
Here are a few examples of goals that might make it to the top of your brief:
Generating website traffic.
Boosting online sales.
Promoting a new product or service.
Company update.
Up-selling.
Develop The Campaign
From your brief, you’ll be able to judge how much time you’ll need to develop your campaign. While certain projects may require only two or three days to get from brief to mail-out, you may need as much as a month for others, especially if external contributors (e.g., agencies or consultants) are involved.
Development refers to two key stages in the production cycle of an email campaign:
Copywriting and layout: Copywriting is an integral part of developing a brief (especially if the same person is doing both things) for some campaigns. In others, a copywriter will work from a brief they receive. In some instances, layout structures the copy and any images of the email to prepare it for the designer, who will take charge of the next stage. Layout isolates the most important elements that need to stand out and does things like defining clickable areas.
Design: There may not be a separate design phase, simply because you won’t always start from zero. In some cases, it will be possible to reuse an old email and change certain parts or work from a ready-to-use template. In other cases, you will design your email from scratch. Your designer will use the copy and layout you’ve already produced and work with the brief to ensure that their work is in line with the campaign goals.
Be Inspired when Designing a Campaign
When designing a new campaign, you’ll need inspiration.
You might find your inspiration in previous campaigns (especially if they achieved good results), or ones run by your competitors - or even other sectors!
Happily, the internet has a wide range of resources to help inspire you. Here are three websites that will get your creative juices flowing:
Really Good Emails: Thousands of emails, sorted into categories, allowing you to see the design and the code for free. Really Good Emails is the world’s best-known source of inspiration for email design.
Pinterest: You may be surprised to learn that Pinterest is an excellent source of inspiration for your emails! Search for email design, and you’ll find great examples. Explore – you won’t be disappointed.
MailCharts: There are also paid services that will allow you to go much further. For example, MailCharts gives you access to email designs and the mail-out schedule from hundreds of brands all organized by business sector, test ideas, the option to compare several campaigns or brands, etc.
What Should You Include in Your Campaign Brief?
Your campaign brief is where you make sure you and any colleagues or agencies you are working with are all on the same page. It should include the following:
General Information
There is some general information that is your campaign's ID card and should feature at the top of your brief:
Campaign name (to differentiate it from other campaigns).
Brand (especially if your company owns several brands!).
Planned mail-out date (even if not yet set in stone).
Number of variations (if going to different segments, for example).
Name and contact details of the campaign manager.
The Goals
Your campaign goals must be evident in the brief and understandable to anyone involved.
The Target Audience
Your target audience is also critical. Here you will describe the selection and segmentation criteria that your campaign manager should use to target recipients. Ideally, when drafting your brief, you should assess how many people will receive your email.
You should also consider the context in which your target audience will likely see the email: will it be at work? Will it be mostly on their mobiles? Will they be relaxed or short on time?
If you’re planning to send to several segments, set out targeting criteria.
The KPIs
What is the measurement criteria that will be used to assess the effectiveness of the email campaign? This will link back to the above goals.
The Message
Depending on who is doing what, you’ll either send information or a draft message to your copywriter.
As a bare minimum, you should include the following information:
Draft subject.
Draft headline.
Draft call to action.
Description of the main product or products.
Links and landing pages that can be clicked through from the email.
The tone of voice the email should adopt.
The Design
As you saw above, this is where you’ll refer back to past campaigns and introduce the email layout. You can also tell the designer which visuals to use.
The Mail-out
Your campaign manager needs details about the preferred date and time of mail-out and whether you plan to send follow-ups.
Other Information
Other information may sometimes be necessary, especially regarding tests (comparing two subjects, testing different designs, etc.).
Let’s Recap!
Give yourself some time to think before you start to develop your campaign.
List your campaign goals.
Consider other contributors such as colleagues, agencies, or consultants.
Get inspiration from previous campaigns, whether your own or another company’s.
We’ve now reached the end of the first part of this course. In part 2, we’ll deal with copywriting, design, and integrating HTML in your emails.
