The one question that will improve all your email campaigns

While working with a large membership association on an email strategy engagement, I reviewed dozens of their campaign briefs. They required information about everything from segmentation and messaging to timing and creative, and one other thing: Goal.

I wish more organizations required marketers to identify that before building an email. It seems deceptively simple, but identifying the goal forces you to answer these questions: Why are we sending this campaign, and how will we know whether it succeeded? That’s much more important to discuss than subject lines or button colors. 

The question was superb. The answers were a problem.

One of the first campaigns I reviewed promoted the association’s annual meeting, which was months away. The email included five calls to action: submit an abstract to speak, view the agenda (which wasn’t complete yet), register, reserve a hotel room, and recruit a colleague. When I asked which action mattered most for that particular email, the room got quiet.

Most of the campaigns I saw listed multiple goals. None of the objectives were unreasonable. It’s just that every objective appeared to carry the same weight.

This is something I’ve seen repeatedly over the years. Many marketing teams are quick to identify everything they’d like an email to accomplish. They’re not as fast at identifying the single outcome that will determine whether the campaign was successful.

Goals vs. good things that might happen

Consider an email promoting an annual conference. Depending on where you are in the campaign, you may want to increase awareness, encourage submissions, drive traffic to the event website, or generate registrations. All worthwhile outcomes, but rarely equally important.

Six months before the event, attracting speaker proposals may be your primary objective. As the conference gets closer, registrations become much more important. If it’s a brand-new event, making people aware of its existence may be the most important measure of success. The business context determines the priority.

That’s an important distinction because people sometimes confuse a campaign goal and a positive side effect. Increased website traffic is great. Additional awareness is great. Social sharing is great. But if those happen while registrations remain flat, would you still consider the campaign successful? Probably not.

Every campaign can produce multiple positive outcomes. It still must have one primary objective.

The “and” problem

Marketers frequently find it difficult to choose from several positive outcomes. “Hi, we want awareness and registrations. Website traffic and conversions. Engagement and lead generation.” Every additional “and” sounds perfectly reasonable because each objective has merit. Collectively, however, they make the campaign harder to design and harder to evaluate.

If registrations are the primary objective for an upcoming conference, that should influence almost every subsequent marketing decision. The subject line should create urgency around registering. The email copy should explain why attending is valuable now. The call to action should focus on registration, and the landing page should make completing that task as easy as possible.

Now imagine trying to optimize that same email equally for registrations, abstract submissions, website traffic, sponsorship opportunities, and general awareness. That email will end up with multiple calls to action, several competing messages, and links that send readers to different places. Instead of helping readers understand what matters most, you’ve delegated that decision to them.

That isn’t a recipe for good results.

Outputs aren’t outcomes

This happens because marketing teams have to spend a great deal of time discussing activities.

The email was sent. The newsletter went out. The social posts were published. The landing page launched. All are important milestones because they represent work completed by the marketing team. They are outputs.

Outcomes answer a different question entirely. Did registrations increase? Did member renewals improve? Did qualified prospects request a demo? Did more people submit speaking proposals than last year? Those are the measures that say if the campaign accomplished something meaningful.

You get better results if planning starts with the desired outcome instead of a marketing activity. Conversations become much more productive, and planning is more focused. Instead of asking if the email includes enough information, the team begins asking whether every element of the campaign supports the one action they want readers to take.

Start with one question

While “Goal” is a great thing to ask for, it needs to be clear that it means “If we could measure only one thing after this email is sent, what would it be?” That question almost always changes the conversation.

Sometimes the answer is registrations. Sometimes it’s member renewals, proposal submissions, donations, or qualified leads. The answer varies from campaign to campaign. What’s important is that the team agrees on one measurable outcome before the email is built.

Completing this one sentence can improve campaign planning more than almost anything else: “We’ll know this email was successful if…” Finish it, and the rest of the campaign becomes easier. Creative decisions are clearer. Stakeholders have a way to resolve competing priorities. All because everyone agreed on the objective before the first draft was written.

Narrowing your focus doesn’t limit what an email can accomplish. It gives the campaign its best chance of accomplishing the one thing that matters most.