An effective email marketing strategy is the cornerstone of an outstanding business and marketing plan.
Email marketing, with the highest return-on-investment (ROI) of all marketing channels, allows businesses to target customers more effectively.
Email can reach far and get your message to a large audience with minimal effort. It’s easy to start an email marketing campaign, and even small businesses can afford to leverage its effectiveness.
There are three main goals in email marketing strategies:
- Understanding your audience
- Building stronger relationships with current customers
- Generating a higher ROI
There are myriad ways to accomplish these tasks, including personalization, segmentation, re-engagement techniques, and automation.
Of all these techniques, automation is one of the simplest and most necessary to deploy. It delivers striking returns of 152% higher click-through rates than non-automated campaigns and significantly reduces strain on marketing teams.
However, that shouldn’t reduce the amount of focus you place on finding out exactly who your target audience is and what makes them tick.
How to measure the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy
No matter which strategy you employ, you’ll want to determine whether or not it’s working. You can do this in several ways, including tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and split testing.
In split testing, you track two (or more) concurrent email campaigns to determine which is most effective. Doing so can help you get closer to all three of the main goals outlined above.
Consider this example of two tracked campaigns:
Source: Campaign Monitor
You can easily see how well both versions did in this side-by-side comparison and choose the most effective one.
KPIs, on the other hand, comprise a variety of different factors. They can include:
- Social sharing
- Website interaction
- Open rates
- Click-through rates
- Click-to-open rate (CTOR)
Tracking any, or all, of these analytics, can help you determine the overall effectiveness of your email marketing strategy. This example below shows a typical campaign tracking report:
Source: Campaign Monitor
This lets you see all of your email campaigns side-by-side for quick analysis. Depending on your outcomes, you can strategize with your marketing team about where to make improvements.
Are more highly segmented campaigns performing better? Time to glean more knowledge about your target audience.
Are your re-engagement campaigns producing lackluster results? You’ll need to work on finding new ways to engage your tribe and get them focused on your brand.
Ultimately, the most effective email strategy is the one that truly resonates with your audience.
Does it really matter?
Paying attention to your audience so you can give them what they really want is not just important; It’s good business.
Do you want the most ROI for the least amount of effort?
Then creating an email marketing strategy that hits your target audience’s pain points, personalizes their experience with your brand, and puts less pressure on your marketing team is critical.
As long as you work toward the three main goals, you’ll be moving in the right direction with your email marketing strategy.
What now?
Now that you understand some of the basic elements of a targeted, effective email marketing strategy, you’ll want to get started fine-tuning your own campaigns.
To begin, dive deep into current campaigns and find out how to get even more ROI from them in the next 60 days. Then keep track of the metrics we outlined above and watch your revenue grow.