When evaluating the performance of your email campaigns, which stats are most important to track? We recommend you start with the following:
- Clicks
- Growth Rate
- Bounces
- Complaints
Let’s take a look at each of these stats in more detail.
Tag: Email Delivery
Mastering the basics of email marketing
Most of us are fully aware of the fundamentals of email marketing, and can execute an effective campaign pretty well. And when things are going smoothly, many of us stop thinking about how to improve our processes–you know, the old, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality.
But improving your current skills and processes can be the difference between good campaigns and great ones: campaigns that win you lots of new subscribers and even new customers.
The importance of measuring ROI (and how to improve your campaign results!)
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.
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How to build great relationships with dialogue marketing
You’ve probably heard a lot about “joining the conversation” and “building relationships” in the context of social media, but have you considered how these ideas could apply to your email marketing strategy? It might be time to give it some serious thought.
Periodic emails updating your subscribers about what you and/or your organization have going on may no longer be enough to get you the results you want. You need to start engaging your customers and prospects in an ongoing dialogue in order to create lasting relationships.
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Responsive design: The key to mobile email engagement
With email, it’s impossible to customize your content for every different mobile device on the market. Unless, of course, you have the time to code many, many different templates… And we all have that kind of time these days, right? Sure.
An alternative would be to send the same content, in the same template, to everyone on your list. The problem with this, though, is that it might look gorgeous on on a 27” widescreen Mac, but it’s going to look horrible–and function even worse–on a super-small BlackBerry screen.
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Building a good reputation doesn’t just happen – it takes work
Today I’d like to follow up on Friday’s post on reputation with a deeper dive into what it takes to build and maintain a great reputation as an email marketer.
Your sender reputation is one of the most–if not the most–important aspects of your email marketing program. It takes a long time to build a solid reputation as a sender, and it takes ongoing vigilance to maintain it.
Read More “Building a good reputation doesn’t just happen – it takes work”
Delivering Engagement: The Content-Value Exchange
Email campaign success depends upon subscriber engagement.
Marketers must understand that trust-building content (i.e., white papers, how-to-guides) and educational content (i.e., ebooks, newsletters) only become powerful if they facilitate a value exchange (both sides must benefit from engagement). Marketers looking to acquire customers and drive high engagement need to focus on consistent and engaging content that delivers value to the recipient in exchange for something (e.g., time, email address). The more valuable the content (built to serve your audience over time), the easier it will be for them to engage with your brand in a value exchange.
Here are a few thoughts on how to engage prospects more fully with your brand:
- Deliver engagement by offering recipients something valuable. Content only delivers engagement if it confers value. Your subscribers need to know they can trust you. When you build trust by offering valuable, relevant and timely content (informative content; not ad speak), you can turn your audience’s precious attention into long-term interest that drives repeat traffic and sales.
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Improve Data Quality by Verifying Email Addresses
Email remains a vital piece of contact information across all organizations and, in order to have a successful email campaign, deliverability is key. Ensuring email addresses are accurate allows you to get your message delivered to the intended recipients.
In my blog post titled, I’ve sent multiple emails and they’re not making it into my (or my recipients’) inbox!, I covered some of the most common reasons that emails may not be delivered to an inbox. In this post I discuss the benefits of real-time email verification, including:
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Data Collection Tips to Improve Deliverability
The key to an overall data collection strategy is to ensure your data collection methods are sound. The quality of the prospect and
customer data being used to target and personalize your email messaging efforts are only as good as the data used to power them.
There are several actions that your organization should take at the point of data collection to ensure that best practice is achieved in the collection and use of data, including:
- Gaining positive consent by using an “Opt-in” checkbox (where the box is unchecked) is preferable to a passive opt-in practice (where the box is pre-checked).
- While single opt-in (no confirmation email) remains the most commonly used permission-based mechanism, double opt-in (where a confirmation email is sent to the new subscriber with a link to activate the registration) provides 100% assurance in terms of the validity of the email address and reaffirms that a recipient does want to receive your messaging.
Making it into the inbox isn’t guaranteed
As email deliverability has become heavily weighted on user engagement, it’s not enough to ‘spray and pray.’ The importance of creating highly relevant and valuable email content has become the key to keeping subscribers opening, reading and clicking through your emails.
Since engagement metrics have become the leading determinant of whether an email message reaches your target’s inbox or spam folder, consider the following 3 tips when putting together your email marketing plan for 2013:
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