The first thing to tackle when discussing your campaign mail-out is how to select your delivery solution. There are lots of options to choose from, and it’s not always easy to know which is right for you. Some solutions are simple, some are cheap, some have heaps of features, and others will set you back the price of a small house in the country every year.
Identify Your Needs
Before sorting through the range of options, take some time to work out what you need.
Team Size and Level of Expertise
In some cases, the whole email campaign production cycle will be run by just a single person, from writing the brief to designing the email to the mail-out and results analysis.
At the other end of the spectrum, you might have a whole team (or several teams) creating the campaigns. In this scenario, different people might be in charge of copywriting, preparing and segmenting data, HTML coding, and uploading the email to your campaign-management solution.
In this second case, features like managing different user accounts are essential, whereas in the first case, user-friendliness is all-important. There is no one-size-fits-all here.
Which Channels Do You Want to Use?
While this course deals exclusively with email, most marketing solutions can also manage other channels. You’ll often have access to a feature that will let you send text messages, create forms, and, more rarely, the ability to manage notifications from your mobile app or synch your addresses with Facebook’s advertising manager.
You should ask yourself which channels you want to use in combination with this tool. Many of the solutions you will encounter offer the chance to manage communication with your audience all in one place, regardless of the chosen channel. This can help to create a joined-up view of the relationship with the customer.
Do You Require Marketing Automation?
So far in this course, we’ve mainly talked about ad-hoc email. In email marketing, it’s sometimes a good idea to program automatic emails. For example, if you know your contact’s birthday, you could send them a birthday message on the big day.
There are loads of different types of automatic emails: a welcome email cycle, an email when carts (or application forms) are abandoned, reminder emails for inactive contacts, etc.
Some solutions allow for very complex automation, whereas others don’t. It’s up to you to choose!
What Sort of Data Will You Use?
You may only have an email address, a name, and an opt-in in your contact list. That’s enough to get an email strategy going. You might also have an order history, information about your contacts’ interests, browsing history, data gathered from surveys, etc.
Some delivery platforms only offer “flat-file” data management, which means the data could be contained within an Excel file as a simple series of columns (e.g., name, surname, gender). Other more sophisticated solutions offer what is known as a relational database, which means your contact is linked to transactions, their browsing history, surveys, etc.
Here again, solutions vary widely. If you’re after advanced segmentation or personalization, you’re going to need lots of data and the ability to handle it.
Features on Offer
Once you’ve listed your needs, you can start the hunt for the ideal solution.
You’ll find that most solutions follow the same structure but can vary in terms of the features offered and the complexity of the tool.
Contact Management
Whether labeled as contacts, lists, audience, or data, every tool will allow you to manage your contacts, data, and segments.
Message Creation
Either using the tool’s built-in email builder or importing raw HTML, you’ll be able to create messages. This includes a subject line, sender name, and a series of other options specific to each tool.
Delivery Capabilities
Scheduling your mail-out, whether ad-hoc or automatic, is a vital part of your campaign plan. Here, again, you have lots of options. Basic functionality is instructing that a given message should be sent to specific contacts. Still, in some cases, you’ll be able to schedule delivery, carry out tests, request that delivery happens automatically at the optimum time for your contacts, etc.
Statistics and data Collection
Once your campaign has been delivered, you’ll want to know how well it performed (this will be covered in more detail in Part 4 of this course). Once again, some solutions only offer very basic, common statistics while others are much more advanced.
Tool Comparison Services
Forrester Wave Email Service Providers (at the enterprise level, this (paid for) analysis report is useful for understanding the state of the art!)
Additional Services
When choosing your email marketing tool, consider the features you need to look at the additional services.
Client Services
In most self-service solutions, where all you need to do is enter your credit card information without prior vendor contact, you’ll only have written support. You won’t be able to reach anyone on the phone if you need assistance.
Other solutions will offer this, although obviously, it comes at a price—your choice.
In any case, the level of support a solution offers is something you must look into before selecting your option.
Other Services
At a design and coding studio, consultants to help you with your email strategy, data scientists to help you work with your data, a technical department able to manage migration from your previous solution, and delivery support can help you when your emails end up in the spam folder. These tools may offer many more services than you might ever have thought possible.
Take a moment to think about it – do you really need them?
Get the Right Price Plan
Money matters! It’s essential to get the right price plan for you.
There are three basic models for price plans:
Pay per Email
In this model, you pay according to how many emails you send. You could pay for a bundle of emails (e.g., 10,000 emails for $20) or pay monthly for a set number of emails per month.
Pay per Contact
In more advanced solutions, prices are often calculated according to the number of contacts you have in your database. It is prevalent for solutions that host a vast and diverse amount of data.
Pay per Feature
On certain platforms, the more functionality you want, the more your monthly cost will be. For each new module you want to activate, you’ll have to pay up.
A Mixed Bag
Email solutions will rarely use only one pricing model. Most of the time, it will be a mixture. Look closely at the way your chosen supplier prices their service!
Let’s Recap!
Identify your level of expertise and the structure of the team in charge of producing your emails.
List the channels that you want to use.
Assess the level of automated marketing that you need.
Make your choice based on the functionalities you need.
See which additional services might be useful to you.
In the next chapter, we’ll look at how to set up your email campaign.
