Email Marketing: #1 in Response Rate and ROI
Is Your Email Marketing Program Delivering Results?
When used strategically, Email Marketing can accelerate your prospects through the purchase cycle directly to your product or service. Email Marketing can also enhance customer loyalty and build referrals and repurchases. All of this adds up to a tactic that was rated #1 in response rate among all direct marketing tactics and that boasts an amazing ROI of 45% on every dollar spent (according to Direct Marketing Association).
Effective email marketing is all about subscriber experience -- sending useful, relevant emails at the right time to people who have requested them. Email marketing is not a customer acquisition strategy; it’s used to continue conversations with prospects, leads, and customers who have given you permission to do so. In short, email marketing is used to aid your recipient’s decision-making process. Everything you do should revolve around this objective.
How to Create a Successful Email Marketing Program
The keys to building an effective email marketing campaign include:
1. Building a permission-based email subscriber list
2. Segmenting your list and targeting your email messages
3. Timing your email campaigns for maximum response
4. Creating landing pages to convert response into desired action
5. Testing your campaigns to improve performance
6. Measuring and analyzing the results of your email marketing program
1. Building: Build a Permission-Based Email Subscriber List
How do you build a list of people who want to receive your emails?
Revisit our premise about content marketing and you can guess where this conversation is going. It is through rich relevant content that is optimized and promoted on your website, blog, the search engines, and through social media that people become attracted to your brand. And where do they go? Your website, of course. It’s the center of all marketing activities. It is at this point that the conversation can begin or end, depending on how well your website engages your prospect and motivates them to take the next step. In other words, your website must give people a reason to become an email subscriber.
2. Segmentation: Segment Your Email Subscriber List and Target Your Message
As you build your email subscriber list it’s important to segment your list as much as possible. How this segmentation occurs depends largely on your business, the number and types of subscribers you have, and the tools you use to attract subscribers. For example, a hotel might divide their list according to customers who stay with the hotel frequently and those who have stayed only once or twice, customers who live within driving distance and those who live further away, previous guests and those who have only visited the website and opted-in to receive emails. The methods of segmentation can be very sophisticated or quite simple, depending on how you intend to use email marketing.
3. Timing: Send Your Email at the Right Time
Timing your email campaigns appropriately involves discovering the days and time that are best for sending your email, the frequency in which your subscribers are willing and wanting to hear from you, and the effective scheduling of email messages to move your prospects through the buying process at a given time.
4. Landing Pages: Action Takes Place Here
Email drives response. The landing page converts it. You need both!
When creating an email campaign, think about the response you are hoping to achieve. Do you want your subscriber to download a coupon? Register for an upcoming webinar? Download a whitepaper? Take a free trial of your product? Your email is used to elicit a response to your offer but where the action takes place is called your landing page.
Generally, a landing page is contained within your website as a standalone page that continues the conversation you’ve started in your email and contains everything the recipient needs to convert – whether it be to download, register, sign up, or purchase, the landing page should create a direct path to conversion.
5. Testing: Test Your Email Campaign to Maximize Results
Testing is critical for improving the performance of your email campaigns. When testing an email, take a small sample of your list and try a few variations on your subject line, offer, landing page, or some other variable to see which is likely to get better results. Once you have your results, send the winning email out to your complete list.
6. Measurement & Tracking: Is Email Marketing Working for You?
Knowing the results of your email program will help you determine what works, what doesn’t, and how to improve in the future. Measuring the response to your email campaign is typically accomplished through the following:
- Using a web based email service, such as MailChimp (our fav!), to deliver your mail. These services include reporting to show you how many people clicked through from your email to your website or landing page.
- Using your website analytics package (Google Analytics is primo) to track the number of people who visited the dedicated landing page for a particular email campaign.
- Measuring the number of sales or conversions you receive to the specific email offer (i.e. the number of people who downloaded your whitepaper, signed up for your free trial, registered for your webinar, etc.).
- Using an inbound marketing software program, such as HubSpot, to measure click-throughs, create and measure landing page conversions, capture lead data, and track the digital footprint of your leads all the way through the sales cycle.
