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Challenge 2: Budget

In these difficult economic times many marketers are facing budget cuts. Buyers are carefully weighing their purchasing decisions and you must scrutinize how you reach potential customers. You can no longer rely on traditional channels such as print, radio, television, or direct mail to fill your sales funnel. These channels are passive as they lack immediate calls-to-action. They also lack the flexibility needed to target specific audience members and the ability to track response and ROI accurately. Instead, you should use direct channels such as email, web, and social media. Your annual email budget will cost a fraction of what you'd spend advertising in one publication and the results will be much better.

Your budget constraints shouldn't prevent you from implementing advanced features. While there might be an additional cost for features such as event triggered messaging or additional production costs to use dynamic content, the increase in performance and conversions will pay for these upgrades many times over. Plus, email gives you the flexibility to try something new with one campaign - you don't have to commit to a whole new procedure upfront. With email, the results are seen immediately and if you aren't happy with the outcome you aren't forced to repeat the process. Email allows you to control your budget and expenses in a way that no other media channel can match. And that flexibility and control will give you what you need right now to reach your potential customers.

Here are some things you can do to keep your email budget under control:

• Build your own lists - Quality always trumps quantity so stop wasting money purchasing email addresses. Instead, put some effort into expanding your list acquisition strategy.
• Monitor your ROI - Before you deploy an email campaign determine how much the campaign needs to make in order to breakeven and then closely monitor the results.
• Determine your optimal sending schedule by segment - Email's low cost and high returns make it tempting to increase the number of deployments during slow economic times. And while it makes sense to send more messages to your audience, you must proceed with caution. Use your metrics to determine the optimal sending schedule per segment and stick to those guidelines.