You’ve started running frequent email campaigns and have set up an email marketing calendar to keep yourself on track, but have you set any email marketing goals? If the answer is no, you’re not alone. Statista reported in 2018 that 28% of marketing professionals admitted to not focus on any metrics that they could track. It may be comforting to know that you aren’t alone, but we’re in the business of helping you grow. To ensure you are getting the best out of the investment you are making into email marketing, we recommend setting up clear goals for this channel.

Where should you start?

It’s important to first understand that metrics don’t equal goals. Goals are what you set out to achieve from your activities, whereas metrics represent data that is used to measure your goals’ performance against. That leads us to the question, what is it that you are trying to achieve by sending emails to your subscribers?

Most people would simply answer: “I want to increase my bottom line,” but depending on the industry you’re in and how dedicated you are to getting the most out of your email marketing channel, you might want to broaden the scope of goals you set out to achieve.

Let’s look at common examples of goals that you could strive to achieve:

• Drive increased traffic to your website
• Retain your current customers
• Collect more information from your customers
• Sell more products
• Sell a wider variety of products
• Upsell or cross-sell products
• Create awareness about events or services
• Reach a wider audience

Email marketing can assist you in achieving all the above-mentioned goals.

How do we make our goals actionable?

Have you ever heard of S.M.A.R.T goals? S.M.A.R.T is a mnemonic acronym that was developed to help you reach your goals and define them better. It stands for the following:

• Specific: When you set up your goals you need to make sure that there is a clear outcome set.
• Measurable: You need to make sure you clearly quantify the metrics for success.
• Attainable: Setting an unrealistic goal will leave you unmotivated, so you need to ensure that the goal you set is achievable.
• Relevant: The goal you set up should be relevant to your business.
• Time-bound: Setting a timeframe helps you stay focused and quantify your goal further

When you are setting up your goals you should make them S.M.A.R.T. Let’s look at a practical example.

Example 1

Say you would like to set a goal for your email marketing to help you reach a wider audience , your S.M.A.R.T goal could be:

Business XYZ aims to acquire 50 new subscribers on their email list for news in X Month through our subscription form on our home page by promoting our newsletter on our social media channels.

The above example is a great well thought out goal as it is:

• Specific - what needs to be done and achieved is clear (promote your newsletter on social media channels).
• Measurable - 50 new subscribers is our metric for performance.
• Attainable - we’ve looked at past performance where we have not promoted our newsletter and found that our average monthly subscriber growth rate is 30 new subscribers per month and we would like to add 20 above this average rate.
• Relevant - growing our subscriber list will help us reach more people which means we are reaching a wider audience.
• Time-bound - we have set a specific month for when we want to reach this goal.

Example 2

Let’s look at another example where you would like to get more feedback from your customers to improve your product offer.

Business XYZ aims to receive feedback from 30% of their subscriber list regarding their thoughts about how to improve their product offer through an email survey by XX date (when the survey is closed)

• Specific - Send out a survey to receive feedback.
• Measurable - 30% of the total number of subscribers in the list should fill out the survey to reach this goal.
• Attainable - Success would be that 30% of their subscriber list fills out their surveys (this would be based on average previous responses rates).
• Relevant - finding out what customers think about your product offer will help you serve them better.
• Time-bound - Based on the window of when people generally look at your emails you can set a short or longer time period to reach this goal.

Now that you know how to set up your goals, we encourage you to start looking at what you are aiming to achieve and create goals for the next three months. This way you have a clear path of what you are wanting to achieve.