A well designed email marketing campaign is one of the tools you can use to take your business to the next level. As it turns out, however, an email marketing campaign is not just about getting people’s emails and then shooting haphazard mails to them. A successful email marketing campaign depends on your crafting a suitable strategy for it and executing the strategy.

A successful email marketing campaign – like any other sort of business campaign has to start with a goal-setting and planning phase. You need to work out what it is exactly that you want to achieve through your email marketing campaign – which constitutes goal setting – and then decide the specific steps you will take towards its achievement, which constitutes planning. Planning is basically defined as deciding to what to do in advance, and as the sages always told us, failing to plan is planning to fail.

When you get to actual email composition, you have to ensure that everything that goes into the emails is consistent with your goals for the campaign. And this includes the subject line. It is amazing how many otherwise good email marketing messages get ignored just because of a poor choice of an email subject line. Seemingly unknown to the creators of these messages is the fact that most of the messages that get into our inboxes don’t get read – and the decision as to which ones to read and which ones to ignore generally has much to do with the author’s choice of message subject line.

Past the email subject line, you need to compose the body of the emails keeping in mind that email – and the web in general- is a communication channel that is really meant for skimming rather than concentrated reading, and therefore ensure that your core message stands out in your message. Generally people give their full attention to the first few lines of a given email message, before skimming through the rest of the message, and you therefore need to ensure that you put what you consider to be most attractive facets of your message right at the beginning of the message.

Still on the e-mail bodies, you need to personalize your message if you are to make any impact. It is only by personalizing the email message to the interests of the reader that you get any chance of selling anything or any idea to them. Otherwise, all your emails run the risk of getting into that category of mails that are simply read – or rather skimmed through – and then promptly put on their way to the ‘trash’ folder.

It pays for you to follow up on the emails you send in your email marketing campaigns – but don’t overdoing it – or you will be running at a risk of being labeled a spammer and being blacklisted from many people’s mailboxes.

Beyond the specific emails you send, get into an email campaign knowing that you might not succeed at first attempt. The key to success here is what success gurus call failing forward – where you use your failure to learn what works and what doesn’t work – so that you can use the experiences you so gain in future email marketing campaigns.

Unknown to many people is the fact that success coaching – especially in corporate settings – is completely linked to effective goal setting.

To understand the link between success coaching and effective goal setting, it helps to first clarify that goal setting is considered effective only when the goals set are achieved, or at least seriously acted upon. Goal setting, contrary to what many people think is not just about stating what you want to achieve after such and such a period. Effective goal setting is a two (main) point process – starting with the definition of what you want to achieve – and then more importantly, taking the steps required to achieve what you want to achieve and ultimately achieving it – or at least learning why you didn’t in case it fails to work out, with what you learn in this case serving as guidelines for future goal setting.

Further, to understand the link between success coaching and effective goal setting in a corporate setting, it is essential to clarify that an organization is the sum of all its members. This means that the success of an organization is the sum of the individual successes of all its members, while its failure is the sum is sum of the individual failures of all its individual members. There is no better place to see the demonstration of this fact that in a football pitch – where the individual members of the organization in question, namely the players of the team in question, individually contribute to the success or otherwise of the organization and where the a slight failure by one member of the organization (a player) can often cost the team a victory, since games are usually won on very small margins. Of course, every team comes with a leader called a coach whose brief is to teach the members of the organization (the team) goal achievement strategies.

And although a business organization works in pretty much the same way as a football team, not many business leaders – be they supervisors, managers or chief executives – like to see themselves in a coaching role. Many of them describe themselves as business leaders (of course using whatever corporate title their climb has given them), but they don’t go as far as defining what that business leadership constitutes – which in essence should be success coaching.

In fact, it can be argued that the success or otherwise of a business organization depends on the extent to which the people in leadership positions in it see themselves as coaches, specifically coaching the people working under them success skills, seeing that, as mentioned, it is the sum of the individual successes of the individuals who make up the organization (in the diverse small roles in the organization) that will ultimate lead to the success of the organization. Of course for this to come to pass, the organization has to start by inculcating a sense of ownership of the organization to its members – so that they can come to own it the way football players feel the ownership of their team, hence their playing for ‘our team’ to win, as they usually refer their action.