This blog uncovers how and why email marketers should use intentional emails to their fullest potential. We'll share how to set objectives, make them real and stick to them. 

Let's jump in.

What is intentional email marketing? 

In the context of email marketing, 'being intentional' means working towards agreed, measurable objectives. 

It can be as simple as a mission statement expressing what the email channel brings to overarching business goals, or a full-blown bureaucratic system of OKRs, SLAs, job tickets and roadmaps.

Ultimately though, we want an objective and a way to assess how well it went afterwards. And that way of thinking can apply as well to every activity in a large email department, as it can to a single staffer running the entire show. 

Step 1: Set one core objective 

Ask yourself or your teammates "why are we sending email?". 

(This may seem like a 'why are we here' kinda thing, but it's worth pausing to put this down in writing because it's remarkable how often - as agency partners - we don't always hear a simple answer or, even worse, get different answers from different team members.)

Here are some examples:

• To drive repeat transactions in our e-store 
• To build trust and loyalty (a relationship) with our audience
• To get enquiries or appointments for our sales reps
• To keep stakeholders (investors, funding partners) updated with our activities 
• To educate our customers about using our product after purchase 

Choosing one core objective doesn't mean there won't be other reasons to send an email, or that the core reason can't change over time. But it helps when thinking becomes muddled, and priorities start to clash. 

Regaining that clarity can be difficult for internal teams, and this is one area where external support comes into its own. A consultant or an agency with an outsider's perspective can be a great way to rediscover your primary objective. 

Step 2: Make it measurable

With an objective established, everything that we set out to do from now on will be orientated towards that objective. 

What does our objective actually look like in the real world? By making our objective measurable we turn it from an abstract idea into a set of tangible results. 

Let's return to a couple of our examples from before. 

To drive repeat transactions in our e-store

The e-store might define subscribers with more than two orders in the previous six-month period, expressed as a percent of all subscribers with any order. 

To educate our customers about using our product after purchase 

Educating customers about product usage after purchase could be measured in terms of UTM-tracked sessions in a documentation library. Bear in mind that a decrease in something can be a positive measure as well, such as fewer support desk tickets for example. 

Some things may not be trackable using hard numbers alone, or may not be easy to attribute directly to email. 

To keep stakeholders (investors, funding partners) updated with our activities 

To build trust and loyalty (a relationship) with our audience

The benefits of keeping your business's investors informed may only be noticeable in the quality of questions raised at the AGM, or customer loyalty might only be apparent in the language used by social media audiences following a major release. 

In both these examples, it's still worth collecting examples and comparing them with the stated intent built into the original objective, and perhaps with earlier examples. 

Stick or twist?

A key way that external partners can help in-house teams is by introducing some tools and processes that protect plans from drifting too much away from their original form. 

Creating a solid briefing process is a good way to align the work with company or channel objectives, setting expectations with colleagues and preventing ambiguity. 

Once the work is done, a retrospective helps evaluate how well the results matched the intent, this time by having the core objective alongside some tangible results. 

Both of these can be short documents with a handful of set questions, like a form, and don't require that the team suddenly becomes very bureaucratic. 

Wrap up 

Our intent with this article was to show that objective setting and key result tracking doesn't just have to be a function of large teams with sophisticated BI tools and hard revenue targets. 

Intentional email means just this: articulate a goal, think of it in real-world terms, evaluate the result then go around again. 

It can be scaled from a single marketing manager's responsibility for their channel to small teams needing to set boundaries with their peers and superiors, to every campaign or initiative that a marketing team undertakes.