While working with a large membership association on strategic email engagement, I reviewed dozens of their campaign briefs. They needed information on everything from segmentation and messaging to timing and creative, and one more thing: purpose.
I wish more organizations would force marketers to identify this before creating an email. It sounds deceptively simple, but identifying the objective requires you to answer these questions: Why are we running this campaign and how will we know if it was successful? This is much more important to discuss than subject lines or button colors.
The question was superb. The answers were problematic.
One of the first campaigns I looked at promoted the association’s annual meeting, which would take place in a few months. The email included five calls to action: submit a summary to speak, view the agenda (which was not yet complete), register, book a hotel room, and recruit a colleague. When I asked which action mattered most for this particular email, the room went silent.
Most campaigns I saw listed multiple goals. None of the goals were unreasonable. It’s just that every goal seemed to carry the same weight.
This is something I have observed many times over the years. Many marketing teams quickly identify everything they want an email to accomplish. They are not as quick to identify the single outcome that will determine the success of the campaign.
Goals vs Good Things That Could Happen
Consider an email promoting an annual conference. Depending on where you are in the campaign, you may want to increase awareness, encourage submissions, drive traffic to the event website, or drive registrations. All valuable results, but rarely as important.
Six months before the event, attracting speaker proposals may be your main goal. As the conference gets closer, registrations become much larger. If it’s a brand new event, letting people know about it may be the most important measure of success. The business context determines priority.
This is an important distinction, because people sometimes confuse a campaign objective with a positive side effect. The increase in website traffic is great. Additional awareness is great. Social sharing is awesome. But if this happens while registrations remain stable, would you still consider the campaign a success? Probably not.
Each campaign can produce several positive results. However, it must have a main objective.
The “and” problem
Marketers often find it difficult to choose between several positive outcomes. “We want awareness and signups. Website traffic and conversions. Engagement and lead generation.” Each additional “and” seems perfectly reasonable because every goal has merit. Collectively, however, they make the campaign more difficult to design and evaluate.
If registrations are the primary goal of an upcoming conference, it should influence almost all subsequent marketing decisions. The subject line should create urgency around the listing. The email copy should explain why it is worth attending now. The call to action should focus on signing up, and the landing page should make this task as easy as possible.
Now imagine trying to optimize that same email equally for registrations, abstract submissions, website traffic, sponsorship opportunities, and general awareness. This email will end with multiple calls to action, multiple competing messages, and links that send readers to different places. Instead of helping readers understand what matters most, you’ve delegated that decision to them.
This is not a recipe for good results.
Results are not results
This happens because marketing teams have to spend a lot of time discussing activities.
The email has been sent. The newsletter is out. Social posts have been published. The landing page launched. These are all important milestones because they represent the work the marketing team has accomplished. These are exits.
The results answer an entirely different question. Have registrations increased? Has membership turnover improved? Have qualified prospects requested a demo? Have more people submitted speaking proposals than last year? These are the metrics that indicate whether the campaign accomplished anything meaningful.
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You get better results if planning starts with the desired outcome rather than a marketing activity. Conversations become much more productive and planning is more focused. Instead of asking whether the email contains enough information, the team begins to ask whether each element of the campaign supports the action they want readers to take.
Start with a question
While “Purpose” is a good thing to ask, it should be clear that it means “If we could measure just one thing after sending this email, what would it be?” » This question almost always changes the conversation.
Sometimes the answer lies in the inscriptions. Sometimes these are member renewals, proposal submissions, donations, or qualified leads. The answer varies from campaign to campaign. What’s important is that the team agrees on a measurable outcome before the email is created.
Completing this sentence can improve campaign planning more than almost anything else: “We’ll know this email was successful if…” Complete it and the rest of the campaign becomes easier. Creative decisions are clearer. Stakeholders have a way to resolve competing priorities. All because everyone agreed on the goal before the first draft was written.
Narrowing your focus doesn’t limit what an email can accomplish. This gives the campaign its best chance of accomplishing what matters most.
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