The Lunch Pail

As promised on Monday, here’s part 2 on road mapping for email success! The focus of this post is more on how to adopt a step-by-step approach.

Step 2: Understand What Needs to Change

There are barriers standing between you and your goals. Honestly assess and understand these barriers. If you’re not prepared to overcome the obstacles, the remaining steps are moot.

Start with the basics:

• Is organizational culture a barrier? (I discussed many of the organizational barriers to direct digital marketing improvement – and how to hurdle them – in a recent post.)
• Is knowledge the barrier? There are countless online resources and professional organizations with capable advisers who publish best practices.
• Is lack of data or technology a barrier? If yes, upgrades are required. However, upgrades do not necessarily bring steep price tags. Despite perceived cost, concentrate on the value because these are foundational elements of your direct digital marketing that need to be addressed.

Step 3: Create A Plan (even if it has to be re-evaluated or overwritten later)

Take your established ground rules and goals and plot out precise steps to get from the starting point to success. Bottom line, have a plan!

It is not necessarily important that the plan is correct – it’s important that it’s created. Accept that you will stray from the plan because you will discover gross miscalculations along the way! This is okay.

For one of our customers I developed a comprehensive 12-month testing plan for email and landing page design, offer strategy, campaign frequency, and just about everything under the sun. The plan is ambitious. Already within the first 2 months of the year my plan has been revised 3 times, with countless on-the-fly modifications.

The plan is your conscience. The practice of revising the plan forces adaptation, creativity, and analytical thought. The plan should support adaptation, not prevent it.

• Map changes and upgrades into how you consolidate, manage and utilize data
• Map changes in process and protocols
• Map the particulars of how the program will adapt and mature
• Map promotional calendars and campaigns
• Map opportunities and schedules for testing. Test everything! Assume nothing.
• Map macro and micro goals. Don’t forget to map out the time and place to celebrate victories!

Step 4: Start Somewhere with Urgency, Then Learn

Boiling the ocean takes a long time. Once the ink is dry on the plan it’s critical to get started – with urgency. You won’t learn anything until you try. This applies to relatively small-scale tactical implementation, as well as large-scale process and cultural change.

Attack one significant component of culture or process change each month. One month may be researching and understanding lifecycle communications strategies and tactics. One month may be deciphering how off-line and online channels impact each other, and how they’re coalesced. The goal is not to implement a new program in one month, but to understand more about an issue and evaluate the priority.

Step 5: Review, Analyze, and Adapt

Poor programs have some common components. One of these is an unwillingness to adapt, or take risks. It’s important to build in time between campaign cycles to nurture analytics and optimization cycles. Ask questions about everything and re-examine every assumption. What worked, what didn’t, and why? What needs to change?

What you did 24 months ago may have made sense then, but may not now. Strategies and tactics become obsolete, they lose momentum. Look at it this way – how has the customer or prospect changed in 24 months? There are countless lifestyle, economic, and cultural changes that impact consumer behavior. If your communication approaches are not adapting, you may be losing touch with your audience.

Post your feedback. Let me know if this approach is helpful for you in 2009, or if you have other suggestions that we can share on the Lunch Pail!