How do you determine whether or not an email campaign was successful? Are you spending a lot of time, effort and budget on your email marketing efforts, only to see minimal return on your investment? What parameters are you using to measure your campaign results?
If you’re unsure of the answer to any or all of these questions, it could be time to make ROI a higher priority in your overall email marketing strategy.
How to measure the effectiveness of your email campaigns
How are you currently measuring the success of your campaigns? In some businesses, such as e-commerce companies, it’s easy to measure. All you have to do is calculate the cost of the campaign vs. the revenue it brought in.
But for other businesses it might take some creative thinking to determine how to measure your results. Consider tracking stats like website hits, page views, file downloads, forwards, new subscribers obtained or sign-up forms completed, and the like. These statistics can offer you abundant insight into the effectiveness of your campaigns.
How to improve your ROI
If your campaigns are not performing as well as you’d like, here are some areas to focus on:
1. Deliverability
You could see up to a 25% increase in your deliverability rate, simply by keeping your email list–and reputation–clean. Make it a point to remove bounces right away, keep your content free of “spammy” words and phrases, and make it easy for people to unsubscribe. For more on this, see our previous post on the importance of building a great reputation.
2. Behavioral targeting
Are you still sending the exact same email to all your customers? If so, stop! Behavioral targeting–sending a series of customized emails triggered by specific customer behavior–is a great way to improve your ROI (see our detailed post about this here). This technique gives you the opportunity to connect more personally with your subscribers by sending them content that is specifically relevant to them. It can help you dramatically increase your subscriber engagement and, yes, even revenue. These so-called “triggered emails” are more technically complex to execute, and require more up-front work, but the improved results you are likely to see make them absolutely worth the effort.
3. Social media
Use your social media channels to build up your subscriber base! For example, write a post that includes a special offer for new email subscribers, and post it on your social network of choice with a link to your email list sign-up page. It’s important to give something of high value away for free in exchange for your new subscriber’s email address. This builds trust and loyalty right out of the gate and, as you continue to build your relationship with them over time, it enables you to send more targeted communications to them via email (see above).
We hope these tips have helped shed some insight on how to improve your email marketing ROI. Tell us in the comments which of the above tactics you want to try first!
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