The previous post looked at brand alignment and important consideration on your tactical activities. Let's move on to analysis of your email marketing strategy.
An important part of forming your strategy will be to conduct a SWOT analysis. If you are not familiar with this term, it is a review of the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats provided by email marketing within your organisation. It's about looking inward at your readiness for implementing a program & identifying areas that need to be addressed for the program to be successful as possible. And, if you have an email marketing process in place, then the SWOT review can benchmark against best-practice. If you are early into program design, then this section can be undertaken at an earlier phase, as part of a review or brainstorming session.
The list of questions below* covers most of the important areas around strategy. You should then attach a "weighting" or other metric to the areas - the maturity level refers to the experience cycle that a company will go through - early phase, transition and then an advanced (strategic) approach:
A similar set of questions can be devoted to "segmentation", "layout & content", "list growth", "automation" and "analysis capability". What's important here is that you define the appropriate metrics for your company & industry. For example, aggressive list growth targets are possibly inappropriate in certain niche industries or segments, where there is a defined set of customers with little customer acquisition potential. The result should be an overall perspective, allowing you to rate your 'maturity level' - you can also benchmark yourself against competitors or industry standards. The result could be a diagram similar to the below.
By now, you have largely finished the 'strategy phase' of your email program, It's reaching the point where it is time to commit to the execution.
-= David