When starting a new email marketing strategic planning engagement, we often rely on a combination of tools to help assess a client's value proposition.
What is working now: For established senders, we start by looking at historical results. What has worked in the past and what has not? What types of links draw the most traffic? Etc.
What is working for others in the space: This is where competitive intelligence tools come into play. Email Analyst allows us to look at the email messages that competitors are sending and it provides insight on the traffic that those emails may be driving through an overlay of traffic data from Alexa. This provides incredible insight into what appears to be working for competitors. Thus, it provides good insight into messaging components that the client may want to consider.
Identify and validate key messaging components: Combining the learnings from the prior two steps, we come up with the key messaging components that appear to be on target for the client's audience. We then develop a survey around those key messaging components to validate which components subscribers want most.
Set the value proposition: The last step in the process is to codify the value proposition. Using all of the data gathered through these three steps, the key learnings are distilled into a single, straight forward value proposition that is used to guide future messaging and list growth initiatives.
There are several advantages to this approach... but the most compelling advantage is that it aligns your program with the expectations of your subscribers. In a marketing channel where the subscriber rules... this is a huge step toward ongoing success.
