You may be familiar with the concept of ‘viral marketing’ when it comes to marketing campaigns on the internet. Simply put, when you run a successful marketing or advertising campaign on social media channels like LinkedIn or Facebook, you might end up with a bunch of fake followers or people who aren’t interested in your product or service.
While it’s usually harmless and doesn’t pose a direct threat to your business, this ‘fake’ engagement can still eat into your profits. When you’re running paid ads, this is even more critical.
Use Retargeting
Paid ads on social media allow you to target audiences based on their previous actions, such as which websites or social media channels they’ve visited. By incorporating retargeting into your marketing strategy, you can ensure that your ads are displayed to as many people as possible—including those who may not have shown an interest in your product or service initially.
That way, when someone clicks on an ad, they can leave feedback about your product or service, or engage with you further via a social media platform.
Set Up Automated Engagements
Depending on the type of product or service you sell, you may decide that automated emails, or automated texts simply work better for you. With these platforms, you can set up automated email campaigns that will send out messages to your email list on a schedule—whether you’re active on social media or not.
Setting up automated campaigns on MailChimp or AWeber, for example, allows you to engage with your audience via email even when you’re not around to monitor their interactions manually. You can also get notifications when someone interacts with one of your automated emails, so you can gauge the success of your campaign from week to week—and maybe even turn off or on automated emails depending on the results you’re seeing.
Delete Unsuccessful Campaigns
So you’ve launched a new product or campaign, worked hard to promote it, and got some traction. But, for whatever reason, things didn’t work out in the end and you ended up with a bunch of unresponsive or non-engaged emails in your campaign’s trash can. What do you do now?
Well, you could begin by asking yourself questions. Was this a worthwhile campaign to begin with? Was targeting the right audience? Was your offer compelling? Did you do enough research into your target audience’s needs and wants?
If you answered ‘no’ to any of these questions, then it may be time to scrap your entire digital marketing strategy and try a new approach. But before you do, you should consider trying out a third-party tool to analyze the success of your campaign. Without this extra step, it may be hard to tell which campaigns worked and which ones didn’t—leading you to potentially waste your time and resources in the wrong direction.
Luckily, with a little bit of organization and some trial and error, you can easily delete a campaign and move on to the next one. Here are some simple tips to help you maximize your productivity when working with customer emails:
Sort Your Inbox By Date
Whether you get notifications via mail or social media, it’s a good idea to keep track of all incoming emails and deliver them in the order they arrived. This helps you see how previous campaigns performed and allows you to easily identify which ones to revive and which ones to start over from scratch.
Delete Unsuccessful Campaigns
The first step to deleting a campaign is figuring out which one you’re going to delete. To do this, you need to go through your trash can and find all the emails that corresponded with unresponsive customers or people who were just plain inactive during the course of your campaign. Sometimes, customers will respond to your emails, but simply ignore the rest—which, for the sake of your campaign, you want to avoid. So it’s best to find and delete these emails before you start your next campaign.
Take Advantage Of Automatic Drafts
One of the simplest ways to start moving forward with a campaign is to take advantage of automated drafts. Once you’ve set them up, automated drafts will queue your emails for you so you don’t have to worry about whether or not to send them. Sometimes, customers will ask you to send a follow-up email to confirm details or to thank them for their business.
When you receive such a request, it’s often smart to re-engage with the customer via email. However, rather than sending out a mass email to the whole list or replying with ‘Hi [customer name], thanks for contacting us’ and then promptly moving on to the next email, you can choose to either opt-in the new customer into your email circle or, if they’ve already interacted with you via email, you can respond directly from the automated system.
The benefits of this approach are many. Not only will you not have to worry about whether or not you’ll have the time to follow-up with each customer, but you can ensure that each email you send out will be relevant to the person you’re addressing—especially since you can set automated emails to only send out messages when an action is taken. So, even if someone doesn’t reply to the first email you send out, you’ll still have that interaction recorded somewhere—and it may even inspire a follow-up email that ends up getting a response. Overall, this is a simple, yet effective way to keep track of your marketing and advertising efforts—and get more out of them—since you don’t have to keep track of all your emails individually.
Measure The Effectiveness Of Your Campaigns
When you’ve launched a successful email marketing campaign, the next step is to measure its effectiveness. The main goal of any marketing campaign is to generate leads and sales, so once you’ve launched a successful email marketing campaign, you can use a tool like Google Analytics to track the number of leads and sales generated from that particular campaign. This way, you can easily determine which strategies worked and which ones needed to be tweaked.
Learn From Mistakes
As we’ve established, one of the biggest setbacks of digital marketing novices is making the same mistake over and over again—without learning from previous mistakes. So when you do inevitably make a mistake, the best thing you can do is to analyze why you made that particular decision and what you could have done better. And the only way to do that is by looking at what happened previously—hence the importance of keeping track of your past campaigns and the benefits of a tool like Google Analytics.
Optimize Your Results By Testing
You can’t control what might happen beyond what you can predict or prepare for, which is why you should always approach your marketing efforts with a healthy dose of skepticism. Ultimately, you have no idea how many people will actually be interested in your product or service—which is why you need to constantly be testing and optimizing to find the right mix of content, offers, and promotions that will generate the most profitable results for you.
Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been at this for years, understanding the differences in speed and in how people engage with content on various platforms is essential to finding the right place for your content to have the greatest impact. Sometimes, a single piece of content will generate millions of dollars in sales—sometimes it can be as little as an article on Facebook or LinkedIn. So, while it’s important to understand the basics of marketing and how campaigns work, it’s also essential to constantly be learning and testing to find the best methods to grow your business.