Establishing Campaign Goals

What gets measured gets done, and your email marketing strategy must have a measurable goal, established early in the planning phase to guide your tactics. The professional email marketer will interview internal stakeholders and management to establish campaign goals and measurement systems. Even better to include interviews with some prospects and customers to derive what’s important to them, your recipients. Ensure that your campaign goals align with overall marketing strategies within the organization.

Email applies well across the entire buyer journey from demand generation (interest) through conversion (decision) to retention for lifetime value. Even customer support emails are important touchpoints for building a long‐term relationship with your customers and your market.

Knowing some of the more common campaign goals will help you establish your own. Here are a few campaign goals with a brief description of each.

• Content delivery: The primary measurement of the email campaign is engagement with published content. For example, gain 10,000 views of our recent whitepaper.
• Revenue or sales: The primary measurement of the email campaign is attributable revenue. For example, earn $10,000 in sales. Each message can move the prospect closer to a purchase, upsale, cross‐sale, or a larger purchase. While this may be the ultimate goal of all marketing campaigns, more success is found when we focus on delighting the recipient. That we want to sell something is implied. The customer will order when ready.
• Acquiring customers: Each message can move the prospect closer to a first purchase engagement. For example, acquire 1,000 new customers or 400 new leads for our new service. Common tactics include sales or “subscriber‐only” offers that create a sense of exclusivity or urgency, loss‐leaders (selling for less than your cost just to get the customer invested), and low‐cost, high‐value samples (first course or first month for $1). Email can also be effective at remedying shopping cart abandonment.
• Reader behavior: Many campaigns are measured by a series of actions made by the customer. For example, earn one public review for every four customers. Goal examples include earning written reviews, social media engagement (interact with us), amplification or sharing of social media content, or setting an appointment.
• Customer satisfaction (or similar sentiment): These campaigns are designed to enhance the reader’s satisfaction as measured by the absence of complaints, a survey result, net promoter score, or other review system. Examples might include open feedback channels: “Is there anything we can do better?”

Other goals can include branding and perception, growing a social media following, fundraising, appointment confirmations, lead nurturing, demand generation, and survey and data collection.