Posted: November 16, 2020
While it seems like 2020 has gone on forever (we still have time to make jokes about how time doesn’t matter during COVID), the reality is that the calendar year is nearing its end. Many businesses are slowly working towards moving forward from the impacts of quarantines and shutdowns earlier in the year. Others are still finding ways to be innovative in moving from surviving to thriving.
For those businesses who are doing more than surviving, or that have been bolstered during the last six months, this blog post is for you. We’ll be talking about how to evaluate and improve upon existing strategies and create new goals for the new year.
Here are the steps Four Tens suggests when making a strategy for the next annual year.
Review and evaluate
Did you have a plan of attack for 2020? Ignoring the fact that nearly everyone’s expectations for 2020 were utterly inaccurate, reviewing the goals and campaigns that you originally planned for 2020 can show any trends in innovation, pivoting, or room for improvement.
Think big picture
It’s impossible to plan so in-depth that you don’t have flexibility to react in your email marketing plan. So, when you’re looking at your strategy for 2021, and you have your evaluation for your 2020 plan, it’s time for a bird’s eye view. Ask yourself/your team these questions:
- How many campaigns should we aim for?
- Are there any product or service launches that we already know we should plan campaigns around?
- Are there holidays/occasions that we know we’ll plan a campaign for?
- Do you have examples of campaigns that your competitors sent out this year or last year that could be a good basis for one of your own campaigns?
SMART goals
For each idea that comes out of brainstorming, you’ll want to attach SMART goals to each one. You won’t know everything this far out. And that’s okay! There’s still value in knowing some details. For example, writing down which segmented lists a campaign might use could be included in your goals. You’ll want to finalize this information when you create the individual campaign details and briefs later when it's time to launch.
Build your calendar
After evaluating, brainstorming, and writing down a few goals, you’ll start putting that information into a calendar. Whether that calendar is physically present in a shared office space, tracked on a marketing CRM service, or even formatted on a collaborative spreadsheet, where you choose to create it doesn’t matter. What is important is putting the campaigns on a calendar so that you can see where there are gaps and overlays, if any. If most of the brainstorming ideas would make the most sense in Q3 and Q4, you’ll want to continue brainstorming new ideas that work for Q1 and Q2.
Evergreen content
While your email marketing strategy calendar will be the main map for 2021, you also want to consider content separate from your calendar. Does your team implement workflows that include email marketing for new customers, lead conversions, abandoned shopping carts, feedback surveys, etc.? When was the last time that content was reviewed? The end of the year is a great time to review these workflows and see what content needs to be freshened up or revamped entirely. Maybe you’ll find you don’t need some of the workflows anymore at all, or completely new workflows for additional circumstances are required. If these workflows are on all year, you’ll want that content to be updated as well as your email marketing calendar.
CRM maintenance
Keeping your CRM running smoothly is something that we’ve talked about before on the blog but it bears repeating here. Your email marketing is only as good as the email lists and data that you use. Keep your contact information up to date, unenroll inactive contacts, and don’t keep spamming unsubscribes. Add a CRM database review project to your end of the year calendar so that your email marketing strategy will be ready to implement in 2021.
While these steps are a lot at first glance, this isn’t something that a person/team will complete in a single day or brainstorming session. Plan on multiple sessions of brainstorming, planning, and putting it all together before your strategy is captured in its entirety.
Another thing to keep in mind is that room for flexibility we mentioned at the beginning of this post. If your strategy is so heavy that every week of every month has an email campaign booked, you won’t be able to react if there’s a new launch, a major societal event, or business is interrupted. Give your email campaign schedule some breathing room and you’ll remain as nimble as needed through 2021.
Does this all sound like gobbledygook and going right over your head? Luckily, Four Tens offers “easy button” levels of marketing. Whether you need a bit of help with a small aspect of your marketing or you are looking to outsource an entire marketing department, that’s what we’re here for! Get in contact with our digital marketing experts today and we’ll review your current and future email (and digital!) marketing goals.