How to Create Effective Campaigns

You put your heart and soul into marketing and hope for the best. But are you making the most of your campaigns?

To increase campaign success, set specific goals, emphasize your uniqueness, and reach out consistently.

Here are 5 steps to help you plan, execute, and measure campaigns.

1. Goal-setting

Campaign goals help you focus your efforts and make better decisions. Every campaign should have a clear goal that guides everything from target audience and message to outreach channels.

To create a campaign, Yesica Ford, Mailchimp’s Director of Product Marketing, suggests deciding what you want to achieve first. “If you’re losing customers, you might focus on retaining them. If you want to raise awareness, you might target a specific demographic.”

Emails, postcards, landing pages, and social media posts should all work together to achieve a common goal.

2. Emphasize your brand

Campaign results improve when your company’s unique voice and value shine through. “Your brand tells a story that transcends your product,” Yesica says. “It shows who you are. With so many options, setting your brand apart can pay huge dividends.”

Personalize your marketing. Paying attention to branding details sets your company apart from competitors.

Reiterate your audience’s value. By emphasizing your uniqueness, you give people another reason to stay loyal or buy.

Be consistent in your messaging. A consistent brand message helps your audience visualize your offerings and values.

3. Maintain your outreach

Marketing takes time. Frequent and repetitive outreach to your audience will help your message stand out and build a relationship. Keep this in mind to avoid getting discouraged or changing course too early in a campaign.

You might think you can send out one message on one channel and get results. “A purchase typically requires multiple interactions across multiple channels for any campaign.”

The trick is to reach out frequently enough to be remembered, but not too frequently. There is no exact formula for the right amount of outreach. Like any marketing campaign, you should plan, measure, and refine your strategy based on your findings.

4. Evaluate and improve

All campaigns benefit from measurement and retooling. Test different audiences, messages, and channels to see what works best. Then tweak the results to improve overall.

“Sometimes, business owners feel they need answers right away,” Yesica says. “Becoming a better marketer requires taking risks and learning from the results.”

Establish a testing strategy from the start. A/B testing allows you to test one variable per initiative, while multivariate testing allows you to test multiple variables simultaneously to see which combination works best.

5. Evaluate results

Knowing which metrics matter and what they mean will help you track campaign progress. Email open rates can reveal the quality of your subject and preview lines. Email clicks can indicate relevant and engaging content. This gives you information about your target market and the effectiveness of your call to action (CTA).

It’s not enough to look at numbers to evaluate your campaign’s success. Consider them in relation to your campaign’s original goal. Your contact list may have tripled, but if you want to increase profits by selling more to existing customers, your strategy needs to be refined.