Now that we’ve sung our ‘auld lang syne’ for 2011, our team is back in action for the new year, filled with vim, vigor and pleasant reminders of the year past.
From today it’s all systems go at GraphicMail South Africa, with full product support available to our clients as normal.
The new year brings new challenges and frontiers. Even if you’ve got a shoe-string post festive-season budget, you can still make effective use of your resources and start your email marketing year off with a bang:
1) Begin 2012 with an email marketing plan
Don’t spend the whole month of January floundering about without any concrete campaign or plans. Do yourself a favor and start setting specific goals.
Why not set one big email marketing objective for the year? Or at least one for each quarter or month. You could, for example, consider goals for the amount of subscribers you want to add to your list in 2012 (see how to add email newsletter subscription forms to your web or social media pages), or get brainstorming in advance for specific promotions such as Valentine’s Day - which is just around the corner.
Keep your plans simple and make sure they're realistic and reachable. Don’t waste time on things that won’t help you. After all it’s a lot more fun, and rewarding, when you know your goals are within your grasp.
2) Make it a year of Measurement
If you haven't yet, there's no better time than the present to become interested in your stats. Record all your benchmarks and measure your successes this year. With GraphicMail’s powerful email marketing tracking and analytics tools, there’s no reason to practice best-guess-marketing and send emails blindly.
Be sure to focus on what’s important to your business or organization as you set your goals — whether that’s new sign-ups, number of fans or followers, campaign ROI or any other key metric. Comparing your figures against last year’s numbers, if you have them, will give you a better idea of what to expect and let you anticipate high and low business periods before they even happen - making it easier to budget.
3) Become mobile friendly
The web is rife with opinions and predictions about mobile technology and what it will mean for marketers in 2012. What we've kept saying is that with the growing popularity of smartphones and the increasing dependence on mobile devices, everyone will want to take their mobile marketing strategies to the next level.
So this will be the year to catch consumers where they are, wherever they are - on mobile.
It’s time to give serious consideration to making your digital communications mobile friendly. Make sure your website and your emails are optimised to work with mobile devices and use mobile subscription tools to grow your email list. Read our Mobile Marketing white paper to learn how to take your marketing mobile like a pro.
GraphicMail hopes you’ll have a prosperous beginning to the new year.
Let the 2012 emailing begin!