If you’re reading this, I assume that you’re already experiencing the benefits of email marketing. You may not always get the open rates you’d like on your emails, but you know they’ll always be eye-catching. Now that you’ve had some time to get used to the idea of email marketing, here’s a quick case study that’ll give you some fresh ideas for future campaigns.
How This Case Study Was Created
To create this case study, we used research from a variety of sources, including the HubSpot Blog, Search Engine Journal, Marketing Charts and Hootsuite.
To start with, I’ll briefly discuss the existing email marketing ecosystem, how search and social played a role in the growth of email marketing and why traditional benchmarks shouldn’t be the only measurement you use to judge the success of your campaigns. Then, I’ll dive into how we used the information gained from this research to craft a winning email marketing strategy for a yoga equipment company.
The Existing E-mail Marketing Ecosystem
Email marketing is a form of marketing that allows businesses to communicate with their customers via email.
The term “email marketing” covers a wide variety of marketing activities, from collecting customer email addresses to sending out newsletters and promotional emails. But, beyond the technicalities, email marketing serves a fundamental purpose: it helps businesses connect with their customers.
Existing in what some may call a “golden age”, email marketing has become an essential part of most business’ marketing arsenals. In 2019, 94% of businesses said they used email marketing to communicate with their customers. That’s a significant increase from the 80% and 69% who said the same in 2018 and 2017, respectively.
This trend is likely due, in part, to the increasing number of businesses that operate across multiple platforms. In 2020 alone, 40% of consumers will have used a business’ product or service through social media, email or text messaging.
This type of omnichannel engagement allows businesses to maintain a consistent brand message and experience across channels – an important consideration for a company that sells several products and operates in multiple locations.
Why SEO And Social Should Play A Role In Your Strategy
While email marketing is a fundamentally different form of communication than, let’s say, traditional newspaper adverts or billboards, that doesn’t mean it’s without its own set of rules and tactics. After all, digital marketers have been using SEO and social media to great effect for years – and if you’ve been paying attention, you know that these platforms work best when they’re utilized in tandem with one another.
Take SEO, for example. Typically used to drive traffic to a website, SEO can boost a business’ organic search engine results through the careful alignment of key words with the content of a website.
If you’re running an e-commerce store, SEO can help customers find what they’re looking for online – but that’s not the only game in town. If you use SEO to attract visitors to your site, you increase the chance of converting those visitors into customers.
Similarly, social plays a vital role in the success of any marketing campaign. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook allow businesses to connect with their customers both online and off – a valuable tool for any brand. Creating and curating content to encourage social interaction builds credibility and trust, demonstrating to customers that your business is here to help and that you’re a thought-leader in your industry. Plus, the content crafted for social platforms is often shared for free, further amplifying your business’ reach.
Traditional Benchmarks Don’t Always Measure Up
It’s natural for marketers to want to compare the results of their email marketing campaigns to see how they’re doing and whether or not they’re meeting their goals. But, comparing your campaign’s performance to that of other businesses can be a tricky business. That’s because many factors influence a business’ success: products, pricing, performance, market share and more.
You see, when you compare your numbers to those of your peers, you’re comparing apples to oranges. Instead, you need to look at how your campaign is performing against the numbers from similar businesses in your industry. This strategy will help you isolate the specific elements of your campaign that contributed to its success and identify areas for improvement.
Take A Yoga Equipment Company As An Example
Let’s take a look at how we used the information we gained from the research phase of this case study to create a winning strategy for a yoga equipment company.
In the beginning of 2020, we were asked to help a yoga equipment company track the success of their email marketing campaigns. The company had been doing well, but they were starting to see trends that worried them. Namely, the number of their open and click-through rates were decreasing.
To start with, we took a look at the company’s demographic and found that their customers were still largely female and aged between 18 and 34. Knowing that this is an audience that’s already engaged with lifestyle content online, we decided to try and attract this audience to their website via email marketing.
Firstly, we analyzed the company’s current website and noted the importance of SEO. As we mentioned earlier, SEO can help bring in organic traffic to a website, which increases the likelihood of conversion. So, we did some keyword research and found that the most lucrative keywords were already being heavily saturated online, making it challenging to stand out among the noise.
Then, we took a look at the company’s email marketing software and analyzed their email templates. Surprisingly, none of the templates were built on the backbone of marketing automation – the software that most business use to streamline their outreach. Instead, they’d manually crafted each email and used tools like Vigorous, MailChimp and HP Mailbox to collect and organize their customers’ contact details. This is often the case with smaller businesses that don’t have the budget or resources for in-house marketing automation.
Crafting A Winning Email Marketing Strategy
The data we collected for this case study didn’t just inform our decision-making process – it also allowed us to create a framework for an effective strategy. Here’s an outline of how we approached the task of creating a winning strategy for a yoga equipment company:
This plan is likely to change as your business evolves, but it’s a good starting point. As you work through it, make sure you revisit the benchmarks and metrics you set for yourself at the beginning of the process.
The Most Important Step
With any new marketing initiative, comes the question of budget and resources. For a yoga equipment company, these were initially the limiting factors that dictated what they could and couldn’t do. But, with a little planning and strategizing, these became the factors that determined how effective their campaign would be.
Firstly, the company needed to decide how much they could spend on email marketing. Fortunately, they already had a decent amount of money allocated to marketing, so this was a non-issue. What was more important was deciding which platform to use: should they continue to use email marketing as a standalone channel or should they try and combine it with another channel, like social media?
This is often a difficult question for companies because, as we’ve established, email marketing is a form of marketing that works in tandem with other platforms like social media. If you’re looking to improve your business’ marketing performance, consider investing in a campaign that incorporates multiple platforms.
Secondly, the company needed to decide how many emails they needed to send out. Once they’d set this benchmark, they knew what to aim for: a regular cadence of emails would allow them to keep in touch with their audience and remind them of the benefits of their product.
This brings us to our next point: making sure your email marketing strategy is properly planned out. What this means is that you should set a schedule – often this will be on a monthly basis – and then lay out a framework for how many emails you’re going to send out on each day.
This is often referred to as an email marketing plan and, alongside the other steps we’ve discussed so far, it forms the basis for a successful campaign. If you follow this formula and consider all the variables that can influence the efficacy of your campaign, you’re guaranteed to succeed. This could include the type of content you choose to send out – something that gets noticed online can get some pretty high engagement rates – the design of your email, and the cadence of your emails (how often you send them out).
To create a successful email marketing strategy, you need to set clear benchmarks, consider the limitations you already have (like budget or resource constraints) and then craft a plan that takes all these factors into consideration.