How to Plan an Effective E-mail Marketing Campaign
E-mail marketing is not a new phenomenon to the technologically
aware martial arts school owner. It is a cheap medium to market
through, and for the adept e-mail marketer, can generate a
substantial return on investment. However, as e-mail marketing has
progressed over the past few years e-mail marketing school owners
have had to deal with different kinds of issues that take place due
to new technology laws and more aggressive spam filters such as
those provided by G-mail.
Starting an e-mail campaign is easy enough if you have the right
resources in place and can prove to be a new revenue stream for some
instructors and martial arts school. All it takes is a little
motivation, good organization and time.
How to Plan an Effective E-mail Marketing Campaign:
1. “Location, Location, Location”
Last year alone there were more than 337,167,248 people in North
America who had access to the internet. Although that sounds like an
enormous figure, it only made up 5.1% of the world’s population with
internet access. From such figures one can readily see the immensity
of the World Wide Web and the breadth of influence it has across the
globe.
For martial arts schools this bodes well as their consumer or
student base could be just about anybody whether it is a car
mechanic in Jersey or a teenage student in Akron, Ohio. Unlike a
business selling Accounting Software, the targets for a martial arts
school are broad and general. The only problem would be generating
geographically relevant “hits” or visits to your website. If you are
a school in upstate New York a teenager from Akron visiting your
site to learn more about bullying would amount to nothing unless the
you or the student were looking relocate. In the same way, if you
have an exciting new MMA program and you work out of Seattle,
Washington generating hits for MMA programs from Florida would be
counterintuitive.
Make sure that your website and landing pages that connect to the
marketing collateral you are sending out through e-mail satisfy a
proximity or geographic area that is relevant to the location of
your school. This means that you will likely be reaching less
people, however the people you will be reaching will have a higher
probability of calling you to sign up or inquire about free trial
classes because your location is close. You would be amazed at the
number of people who choose one school over the other based on
convenience of location. If you think about it logically, if you are
a full-time mother with 3 kids who each have different after-school
programs they need to get to then location becomes a priority.
Make sure that the marketing material you are sending reaches the
people in your area. If you have access to school district maps this
could be a help as it draws objective boundaries for local areas.
This way you can visualize the distance parents and students are
willing to travel to get to your classes.
2. “Building a Strong E-mail List”
Building an e-mail list is difficult for any company. Usually it
takes a long time to build a sizable e-mail list and lot of effort
on the marketer’s part. However, one thing that any martial arts
owner should keep in mind is that an e-mail list is dynamic and
continuously growing so even if you have only 50 e-mail addresses as
of now there are many channels that you can employ to grow that
list.
a. Your Website: Your website should be your main marketing channel
and should have what is called “lead boxes” or “opt-in” fields where
people give you their information in exchange for something—in most
cases a free trial lesson or free uniform if they sign up now. These
are fields on a landing page where people give you their
information. The information you want from your online visitors is
their e-mail, phone number and name. More extensive fields are
entirely up to you and can be as extensive as needed however the
more information you have the better.
b. Your Students: Did you know that the average Facebook user has
over 100 contacts. The average high school student has over 120
e-mail contacts. Recognition by association or “being popular” is
what drives the psychology of anybody between 12-20 year old. If you
have 50 students, it is most likely that you will have 40 students
who will have viable e-mail addresses. If you multiply that the
average, you have 480 e-mail addresses that could potentially be
added to your list. Make sure that you send out marketing materials
to your students and that it has a forward to a friend option.
Furthermore, in order to capture the potential student’s
information, ensure that the marketing material has a strong funnel
to a lead box or “opt-in” field.
c. Telemarketing: Cold calling is also an effective way to build up
a strong e-mail list. Whether or not your school employs this
method, any calls that are handled by your school should end with
some information being collected.
3. “What is the Main Objective of Your E-mail Campaign?”
When creating the material for your next e-mail marketing campaign
make sure you set for yourself clear objectives before proceeding.
Objectives help you scale and measure your campaign. When creating
e-mail marketing material try to envision how you want that
particular marketing piece to work. What do you want people who are
seeing this to do? Of course, for the majority it would be for the
recipient to directly sign up as a lifetime student. But, for
consumers to get to that stage is a lengthy step-by-step process.
The objective of most e-mail campaigns is information, so make sure
that you e-mail material has a clear, effective and readily visible
lead box of “opt-in” form.
Here is a compilation of tips and hints to pay attention to prior to
sending out mass e-mails to potential students:
1. Permission is Required: While sending
unsolicited email messages may irritate your subscribers, this may
also lead to people unsubscribing from your e-mail list or worse
produce a spam complaint. Unsubscribing is common, however if you
find a disproportionate number people unsubscribing compared to the
number of addresses of your list then you most likely need to change
your methods. One way is have a “double opt-in” feature or a small
line and an already checked box underneath your lead form informing
people who are signing up that they want to receive e-mail material
from you. Lazy people will disregard this box and may unsubscribe
later on, however this will create a clean list of people you know
who are engaging your e-mail material.
2. List “Hygiene”: Keep your list clean of bad
email addresses, which are likely to harm the campaign’s performance
and reputation. Reputation is based on a number of factors, but if
keep sending e-mails to bad e-mail addresses, or your e-mails are
being blocked by spam filters, or you are getting complaints from
people, you may get blocked or “blacklisted” by independent service
providers.
3. Get “White Listed”: Some independent service
providers (in this case e-mail service providers such as Hotmail)
distinguish common senders from spammers. You can contact your ISP
and request to be included on their “White List”. Each e-mail
service provider differs in how your can get “white listed” however
they will provide you with certain steps you need to take to ensure
that you e-mails will reach its destination.
4. Delivery Test: Before you send out your e-mail
make sure test it. A test means that you get a “fresh” eye to look
over it for editorial considerations and that you test in several
different e-mail providers. For example, you will want to test your
e-mail in G-mail, Yahoo! and Hotmail because each e-mail provider
has different rules and limits to e-mail sends which may affect
content of your e-mail dramatically.
5. Recipient’s Privacy: Some people just don’t want
e-mail from anybody, and you will at times get angry responses to
the virtual masterpieces you have created. If somebody e-mails you
asking to be unsubscribed you can either guide them to the link to
unsubscribe or do it yourself. It is better to have a clean list
rather than a large list. In most cases, if a person request to be
unsubscribed and continues to receive e-mails from you they will
most likely file a complaint against you which could lead to your
e-mails being blacklisted by the e-mail service provider.
6. Satisfy the Needs of Your Subscribers: As
difficult as it sounds, try as much as possible to please the
majority of people opted-in to your e-mail sends. If you find that
you get the most opens for MMA or Bully Prevention then try to focus
your content around dynamic content related to those topics. After
several sends you’ll begin to pick up on what people what to see and
read about.
7. Recipient Data Management: Your subscribers
should always have access to their subscriptions. They should be
able to contact you whenever they feel the need and have the option
to forward the message to others. If additional information is
needed they should be able to procure that information either
directly from you or through a link that connects to your main page
or an FAQ page.
8. Email Value Proposition (EVP) and Subject Line:
Your recipient most likely gets flooded with dozens of e-mails
everyday. Most of them referring to enlargement pills, cheap
pharmaceuticals, free vacations etc. Ultimately your subject line is
going to determine whether or not a person opens your e-mail. One
way is to study how to write effective headlines. The second is to
have your school name branded in the subject line. This will
increase recipient awareness making it more likely that they will
open your e-mail. Again, ensure that your content and layout have
strong value for the recipient otherwise they will end up never
opening e-mails from you again and relegating you to their junk box.
9. Personalization: Using names or some form of
personalization will also increase the likely hood that the
recipient will open the e-mail name. Most e-mail software for mass
e-mail sends will have this feature.
10. Maintaining Deliver Value: People’s needs and
wants are like the seasons. They change every 3-4 months based on
trends and overall consumer behavior. Try to stay current with what
you recipients are subjected to in the local and national media, the
latest in health trends, and how your area is doing economically. By
sifting through these materials you will find keywords and issues
that will help you form your content and subject line to help your
e-mail sends retain a strong value quotient with your recipients.
11. Use E-mail Marketing Software: For those of you
with substantially large e-mail lists, you will most likely need an
e-mail marketing program to manage e-mail sends. Even for small
lists of 50-100 e-mails, it is more effective to make
the investment in software that allows you to handle sending e-mails
to multiple e-mail addresses. The other benefits of e-mail marketing
software is that it gives your reports on whether or not people
opened your e-mail (how effective your subject lines are), what they
clicked on or click-through rates (e-mail value proposition), which
e-mail addresses are producing bounces or are not being delivered
(list hygiene), and allows you to personalize and format your
e-mail. A solid investment will save you time and money in the long
run and will help you produce more effective and high performance
e-mail campaigns.
12. E-mail Spam Laws: Countries such as the U.S. and Canada
have their own acts that regulate e-mail marketing initiatives to
protect subscribers from harmful marketing material.
Furthermore, e-mail service providers have more stringent rules and
regulations that may lead to your e-mail being blocked or filtered
as spam. Make sure you read up on some of the more basic rules and
regulations to ensure that your e-mail reached the majority of your
recipients.
By Joseph Seo
For more information on e-mail marketing campaign strategy or to learn more about how to manage e-mail marketing campaigns using software, please contact darren.prasad@championsway.com
