Email is one of the most effective forms of digital marketing, and its widespread use among businesses indicates that there is a lot of potential for growth. However, establishing and running a successful email marketing campaign is not as easy as it seems. To increase the return on investment (ROI) of your email marketing efforts, you must consider several factors – from analytics to segmentation. Let’s take a closer look at how you can use email marketing to achieve greater success.
1. Measure & Analyze E-mails
The success of any marketing campaign, regardless of the platform, depends on the ability to measure results and draw conclusions from these measurements. Email marketing is no different, and one of the key elements to effective ROI is measurement and analysis of e-mails. Without accurate data, it is impossible to determine the success of your campaign, and you may end up running a test-and-learn exercise with little to show for it. Worse yet, you may decide to cut corners and use inaccurate data in your analysis, which could seriously undermine your results and open you up to fraud. Fortunately, there are tools available that make this part of the process much less strenuous. A few years back, measuring email success would have required you to rely on a combination of Excel and HTML tables to keep track of open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Thankfully, modern-day platforms such as MailChimp, HubSpot, and Pardot make this part of the process extremely convenient and even automatable. These platforms, in addition to providing you with a place to store and send your e-mails, also track the e-mails themselves as they are sent out, gathering all the relevant data in the process and compiling it in a standardized manner that can easily be accessed by the decision-makers.
2. Create Multiple Destinations
When someone decides to engage with your brand via e-mail, the first thing that can determine the success of your campaign is the amount of effort that they put in, as they must navigate their way through a series of e-mails in order to get to the point where they decided to purchase your product or service. The reason that this is important is that you can significantly increase the odds of the person who receives your e-mails finding value in what you have to offer by tailoring each of them to appeal to the recipient. This can be done through a combination of factors, but the main one is the use of personalized emails. The more you can do to make each one of your subscribers feel like you are addressing them specifically, the more effective your campaign will be. Make sure that you do not abuse this tactic and send overly personalized emails – the last thing that you want to do is make the subscriber feel like you are spamming them.
3. Use Call-to-Actions (CTAs)
To engage consumers and encourage them to take action, your emails need to include some kind of call-to-action (CTA). Whether it’s asking the reader to download an app, submit a contact form, or buy a product, every e-mail should include some sort of CTA in order to catch the reader’s attention and get them to engage with your content.
4. Identify & Target the Right Subscribers
In addition to using e-mails to encourage action, you can use them to identify and target the right audience. One of the biggest keys to a successful e-mail marketing campaign is finding the right subscribers who will best respond to your offers. Before you get started, it is important to do some research and find out who your ideal customer is and what they want. This is usually done through A/B testing, where you send out different versions of your e-mails to see which one performs best. A/B testing allows you to compare different versions of the email and determine the optimal route to take based on whatever metrics you have available. Don’t just send out one version of the email to your subscribers without testing it first – you could lose a lot of money and wasted effort due to poor conversion rates if you do this.
5. Measure & Analyze the Results of Your Campaign
The results of your email marketing campaign should not be judged solely by the number of emails that you send out or how many people click on the links in those emails. Ultimately, you want to measure the ROI of your campaign based on the results that you get – the conversions, the leads, and the sales. To do this, you will need to consider several factors, including the size of your audience, the quality of your subscribers, and the type of content that you send out. You can use tools like Hubspot and Pardot to easily access these numbers and see how your efforts are performing in comparison to others.
6. Continue To Improve
If you are finding that some of your emails are performing better than others, then it may be a good idea to test out new approaches and see which ones increase engagement and drive more conversions. One method of doing this is by sending out a follow-up email that includes new information that was not included in the initial communication. For instance, if you are selling beach chairs, and your email contains a CTA to visit your website, then you can follow up with an email that includes information about the many different types of beach chairs that your product line offers.
7. Use Personalized E-mails
Your personalized emails will not only serve to engage with your audience, but they can also be used to send out marketing and promotional campaigns. This is one of the simplest yet most effective things that you can do to increase the effectiveness of your emails and optimize your ROI. By incorporating customer data such as name, e-mail address, and website into the subject line and/or body of the e-mail, you can tailor your messaging to be entirely unique to each individual recipient. It is a good idea to use a tool like GetResponse to create and send out these personalized emails – they make it easy to segment your list based on any data that you may want to use in your campaigns.
The ability to measure and analyze the results of your email marketing campaign is critical to your success. Without it, you may end up running a test-and-learn exercise with little to show for it. Moreover, without a clear understanding of how each individual subscriber is interacting with your content, it is difficult to identify the source of any problems and the point at which they occur within the conversion process. This makes it much harder to debug issues and improve conversion rates.
E-mail marketing is a fantastic tool for any business, and with a little bit of experimentation and careful planning, you can significantly increase your odds of achieving success.