Having thought about her content, her question was how was she going to share it. With a website under construction, having a landing page was not an option. Besides which, I advised her to keep it local at the beginning. It being her first campaign and after measuring success and the strengths and weaknesses of the campaign it could be replicated to a wider audience in the future.
One of the first things we talked about was her newsletter. Having recently signed up to Mailchimp we talked about how lists were made, types of email headers and that all of the networked contacts she had made needed to be on an appropriate list as soon as.
I then asked her, who do you know? What contacts do they have? Who could she collaborate with? Who would be happy to include her campaign in their newsletter? Who would be happy to share it on their Facebook business pages? Once these questions were out in the open, suddenly the list of people to connect her idea with flowed continuously.
The glaringly obvious one was the client she had recently worked with. As they were going to be included in her campaign, this would be an easy one to start with. Would her client be able to share her campaign with her contacts or connect her to people who would be interest? It soon turned out that there were many others that she could potentially contact who had links into the niche that she was aiming her offer at.
I then suggested that her first email would allow for an early bird rate with a time specific request to book up a certain date. Depending on the take up rate another email could be issued as the date was getting close. If relevant create offer on your Facebook business page and share. Better still pay for it to be shared to a demographic outside of your current fans and friends of fans.
As a small business owner with access to technology and social media, it is easy to run away with the idea that you can have business dripping in thick and fast from all over the place. Hit the pause button for just a second. As well as marketing your business, doing your business admin, and earning your bread and butter, once you have clients on your calendar, there's email exchange and preparation, time out for journeys, time to work on your client projects. You need to delight your clients at all times and under promising and over delivering goes a long way to keeping a relationship nurtured. You need these delighted customers to be part of an ongoing circle of influence and collaborate with in the future. So from a small campaign you could reap a handful of clients, do an amazing job, request some feedback, assess what worked well for you and what didn't and repeat campaign. A successful campaign requires planning, from idea right through to final review of your campaign, so please don't just jump in feet first.
So here’s a serving of tips to bear in mind when planning your first email campaign:
- Keep the campaign small and measurable.
- Who do you know?
- Who can you collaborate with – who is happy to share your campaign to client base?
- Plan out from start to finish how you will circulate – don't do everything at once, stage a variety of activities across different platforms over a small period of time.
- Over deliver when clients least expect it
- Get feedback and assess campaign
- Repeat
Have you been working on a campaign lately? What worked well for you? What were your findings? And what would you share to others?
Yours socially