Email marketing continues to be one of the most cost-effective ways to reach your audience, increase engagement, and secure more purchases. In fact, in 2022, 59% of survey respondents say that marketing emails influenced their purchases and 50% of people buy from marketing emails at least once a month.
So, how do you increase your ROI on email marketing and keep engagement high? By now, we all know the importance of segmentation and automation so today we’re looking at the 5 lesser-known secrets to running a successful email marketing strategy.
While it’s not the most creative side of marketing, managing campaigns is crucial for email marketing health and effectiveness. This means reviewing all your campaigns and ensuring your automations are running smoothly, links are working, audiences are accurate, etc. In doing so, marketers can proactively oversee and monitor their campaigns to ensure performance metrics are being met.
For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $40. - Oberlo, 2022
It’s important to audit your existing data at least once a quarter to ensure you have the most up-to-date information on your customers. This includes looking for any errors, duplicates, change of location, email addresses, etc. Without the most accurate data, it becomes impossible to communicate with your customers one-to-one and make their experience with your brand personalized and relevant. If you identify any gaps in your data, you can start to address data collection practices with your staff.
80% of customers are more likely to make a purchase because of personalization. - Litmus, 2021
Web tracking opens the door for more segmentation opportunities. For example, it enables you to identify and reach out to those who browse your site but don’t make a purchase. Based on their browsing history, you can gather inferred interest in particular items and related products that a customer is likely to buy with the right communication.
This is the perfect time to build an abandon browse campaign — you can set up personalized, automated emails that encourage buyers to return to your site and make a purchase. One study found that this type of behavioral segmentation had an 80.9% higher open rate and 50.5% higher click through rate than traditional emails. When building this campaign, be sure to use UTM parameters (short pieces of code you can add to links to track clicks and traffic from a particular source) so you can view performance at a granular level.
The overall goal of email marketing is to keep engagement high and opt-outs low. Only communicate with your customers when it’s pertinent and valuable to them rather than sending emails just for the sake of it. If you overcommunicate, customers begin to feel like just another number on a list and will be more likely to unsubscribe. Instead, you want to use segmentation and personalization in your campaigns to maintain customer trust and drive retention.
49% of consumers reported that they’d like to receive weekly promotional emails from their favorite brands. – Statista, 2022
As you continue to monitor your campaigns, you can make strategy adjustments based on the metrics you gather. This is an iterative, ongoing process that can set you apart from those who set it and forget it. One example is UTM tracking, which bolsters an understanding of campaign performance and enables you to see which campaigns are under or overperforming. When monitoring campaign success, there are several key metrics to consider, including:
Data driven email marketing is most impactful when you can track your results. With the right tool, you can easily view these metrics with sophisticated reporting features that help you optimize marketing spend, track sales and engagement, and identify impact on ROI based on each campaign.