5 Make-or-Break Moments for Your Marketing Campaigns

When driving, inattention to detail can lead to huge fiascos. For marketers, glossing over some of the key specifics, or ignoring them altogether, generally means poor campaign performance—or worse, loss of profits. I’m not talking about QA, things like bad grammar, misspellings, faulty links and general formatting issues. It’s the other, less obvious mistakes that can be real threats to your campaign success.

With the fast-paced nature our business, sometimes we fail to stop and think about the bigger picture. As you travel the path through campaign execution, your actions can mean all the difference in where you end up, especially when quantifying results. Here are five guaranteed “campaign killers” to be on the lookout for:

1. Segmentation Management
   Determining the right audience is a huge factor in campaign success or failure. You can have all of the right elements in place, but, if you are putting them in front of the wrong people, your results will be dismal. How do you manage your mailing list against the proper segmentation for a given campaign? Is there a mechanism to check the audience to make sure it is appropriate for the communication? Or do you send emails to any list of contacts you are provided, regardless of its source? Or, worse, just send to your entire database?
2. Content Connection
   Make sure there’s a seamless transition from your email to your landing page to your asset delivery and that customers get the same message and quality of experience regardless of the channel they use. Are expectations properly set around what your recipient will receive and how they will receive it? Is branding, look and feel consistent throughout the user experience and across channels?
3. Fair Trade
   Is your offer a fair trade for what you’re asking in return from the user? Relative to user expectations on the internet, are you giving something in exchange for the user’s information that demonstrates reasonable reciprocity? Find the sweet spot for each piece of collateral to ensure you get the information you need without causing prospects to hightail it from your landing pages.
4. Bait and Switch
   Does your asset provide valuable insight or information to the recipient, or is it a thinly disguised sales pitch? Nobody likes to be scammed, so this technique will only result in mass abandonments of your messaging. Be careful to provide real value if you want real value, or leads, to come back to you.
5. Follow Through
   Once you’ve crafted a great message, provided an informative asset and generated great responses, what’s left? You need to provide logical next steps so those interested can dive deeper into a conversation about your ability to solve their business challenges. Otherwise, they’re left rummaging through your website, trying to find information that fits their needs. Offer related content that might help people through their research or give them a way to raise their hand and go directly to a salesperson—whatever you do, don’t leave your responders hanging or they might leave you.

Attention to all of these details is necessary for campaign success. Having a roadmap is one thing but following that roadmap is vital. A miss at any of these make-or-break moments in your design and execution is a campaign killer that will stop your responses cold.

Read more:

• Make or Break Moments: Seeing a Crisis as an Opportunity Can Make Your Brand Stronger