Email has stood the test of time. While new technologies pop up every day, 91% of consumers check their email at least once a day and report it as their preferred channel for marketing messages. This is great news for an email marketer, who is always thinking about how to reach customers through email campaigns.
But, email marketing can be tricky. You have to be cautious about how you much email you send, who you’re sending it to, and when you’re sending it. And it can be difficult to stem the flow of email requests that constantly come across an email marketer’s desk. Email marketers need a process, or else get buried in a mountain of requests.
The right kind of email marketing process
When you’re planning an email campaign, there are so many different factors to consider. You have different messages, audiences, schedules, and goals in the mix. And usually this information is all being piped into your email inbox, where it can get lost in the shuffle of the day-to-day. In other words, it’s chaos.
With requests from your marketing team pulling you in one direction, you have the customer perspective pulling you in the other. Customers don’t want to be bombarded with promotional messages that aren’t relevant to them. We’ve all been there: if a company sends a barrage of messages promoting something that’s not relevant, we clean up the clutter and hit the unsubscribe button. This is a marketer’s worst nightmare.
With the ultimate goal of staying connected with the customer, what’s an email marketer to do when handling requests from the team while also caring for the customer experience?
Jira Core is a project and task management solution for marketing teams. Email marketers can use Jira Core to streamline the way email campaigns are planned for and sent, without bombarding a customer’s inbox. You can customize workflows and tasks to ensure that you have the information you need to make smarter decisions about what to send, and when to send it.
When teams ask for an email, certain information should be provided. Here is an example of the information that your teams needs to provide:
- Email type: newsletter, product announcement, etc.
- Group requesting the email
- Target market
- Content: what’s going in the email
- Send date
Once the team has received the request, it goes through a customized workflow that takes email marketing processes from chaos to calm:
Here’s the workflow:
- Request comes in from marketing team to send email
- Requestor provides content (and ideal send date)
- Content is examined to ensure that the message is relevant
- Build out email with respective content and creatives
- Email team approves and ensures the message is customer relevant – they do this by segmenting via product, location or type of customer
- Requestor approves draft of the email before finalization and ensures the accurate target market
- Email team sets up the email in platform
- Email is scheduled and waiting to be sent
- The email goes out and analysis can happen
- And then, you’re done
Having an email marketing process means transparency
By using Jira Core, your team will promote transparency between the marketing team and the email team. When everyone can see a full calendar of campaigns, last-minute requests are easier to respond to. Plus, email marketing teams can even start picking out patterns in who requests what type of emails most often, and it helps them think ahead to organize work before requests even come through. In the example below, you can see all the emails scheduled to be sent for the month. You’ll notice that some there is an email sent almost every single day and sometimes twice in one day. And that’s okay, because as we said earlier, that we’ve segmented our customers so that they don’t get bombarded with messages that do not apply to them. Not every customer gets the same email.
As a result, Jira Core helps email marketing teams gather the proper information, follow all the required steps and provides visibility to the email queue so that they can target the right customers at the right time. Plus, you’ll see immediate value in the relationship with your customers because you’ll be more connected, and keep them informed about your products. By utilizing Jira Core’s capabilities, you not only to see the big picture, but to get down to the nitty-gritty details so that only relevant emails are sent.
If there’s one thing an email marketing team loves it’s more people informed, engaged, and definitely not unsubscribing.