While it is a best practice to constantly review and optimize various aspects of your email marketing campaigns, when there is a crisis or other occurrence that impacts your audience in dramatic and unexpected ways, it becomes vital that you take a step back and ensure your campaigns are properly aligned. Even if your strategy is to take a business-as-usual approach to your email campaigns, that should be a decision reached after careful consideration, rather than simply a default approach.
Here are just a few steps you should take when evaluating if and how your email marketing program should address or adapt to a specific situation.
Review Your Mailing Schedule
There is an old saying that timing is everything, and in email marketing, we know this is a very accurate statement. A huge factor in a campaign’s performance is having it set up to reach recipients at the right time. Think of something as simple as an abandoned cart email. This type of email campaign is so effective largely because it is driven by an action the recipient recently took — putting some items in their online shopping cart, but then not completing a purchase. Similarly, an email campaign that ties into the season or a particular upcoming event or holiday uses timing to drive scheduling.
A sudden crisis or major unexpected event creates an entirely new scheduling challenge that may impact your well-planned email campaign schedule. Your audience’s concerns and motivations may be completely altered for a period of time. This situation necessitates that you review your mailing schedule to determine if it should be revised to better reflect the needs of your recipients.
This review doesn’t mean you should suddenly pause all your email campaigns. While that might be warranted, it may also be that while you need to adjust your timing, the campaigns themselves would still be welcomed by your audience at a more appropriate date and time.
Revise Your Email Content
Once you’ve reviewed your mailing schedule, the next step is to evaluate your email content. Regardless of the situation that is impacting your audience, you need to step back and determine if your current email content (subject line, copy, graphics, offer, etc.) still make sense to send given the new circumstances. For example, in a time of national crisis, your previously planned humorous email content may now seem inappropriate.
At the same time, it’s important to make a careful evaluation and decision about your content. Is a new email that specifically addresses the situation appropriate? Are you changing certain aspects of your business (special offers on relevant products or services, changing support hours, etc.) that you should communicate to your campaign recipients? Consider carefully what your audience will appreciate and find engaging in the situation, and revise your content and campaigns accordingly.
Remember that despite the changes you may make, it’s important to stay true to your brand image and personality. Although, at times it may even make sense to temporarily change your messaging style while addressing the situation.
Evaluate Your Audience Targeting
You may already have a well-defined and successful audience segmentation strategy in place, but depending on the severity of the situation, you may need to change that program at least temporarily. Imagine a situation where a marketer is preparing a campaign with a summer theme (let’s say with a special offer on flip-flops), but one region where the campaign is set to run is suddenly hit with a late-spring blizzard (if you live in Colorado, you’ve experienced this firsthand). You might decide to run the campaign anyway, but it’s fairly likely those recipients in Denver aren’t too interested in flip-flops while they are shoveling three feet of snow off of their driveways.
In the above situation, it could be effective to change your audience targeting at the geographic level, to either suppress recipients in Colorado or possibly change your messaging strategy to them and send a different email campaign (or at least note the humor in trying to sell beachwear to people currently dressed in winter coats and boots). Either approach is accomplished by making that adjustment to your audience targeting strategy.
The key is to make determinations about what segments of your audience are impacted by a situation and then identify ways to message them appropriately (or don’t message them at all).
These steps aren’t all-encompassing but should provide the basis of a solid approach to ensuring your email marketing is aligned with any given situation.
