How to get email marketing results!

Our last blog post in the Email Marketing mini-series outlines the importance of Execution and Reporting.  The purpose of an email is not to get as many click-throughs as possible, but to trigger an action, such as: item purchase, increase of web traffic or referral of your product or service to a friend. Email Marketing is one of the most trackable and accountable forms of direct marketing. The best reporting metrics are the ones that can justify the use of email marketing and the role it plays for your companies brand awareness, purchase facilitation and identify the value of your marketing dollar! Two ways of generating results include paying particular attention to your execution and reporting.

Execution:

• Smart execution of an email campaign is vital to the success of your message.
• Ensure you have tested how your campaign renders in different browsers and email accounts (Safari and Yahoo mail vs. Internet Explorer and Gmail).
• Seed (include) yourself in the final send-out to see the final result.
• Use a check-list to tick off what needs to be done to ensure seamless execution. This is great quality assurance!
• If your list has a good sample size, then segment it and test different time-of-day and day-of-week strategies on less relevant campaigns to know when your email campaigns are likely to be the most successful.
• Use data insights from your current campaigns to establish what is relevant to test. Do you have enough data to test different strategies all at once? Do you need to test over multiple campaigns to see results?
• Try different ways of testing your email campaigns. For example, test different subject lines, different call-to-actions, different design layouts to see which ones are most successful.

Reporting:

• Remember: when looking at your report don’t just focus on the click-through rate. Your email usually drives people to some of your other channels, like your social media pages. 
• It is impossible to measure the entire impact your email campaign has had, however there are a few things your email campaign can trigger: higher brand awareness, “forward to a friend” email, non –related email purchases, direct contact, membership, increased web traffic, and visit to a retail location. 
• Most activity happens in the first 7 days, although usually a report trails back 30 days. 
• Pay attention to active subscribers (clicking through), passive (never click-through) and inactive (don’t open and don’t click-through). 
• Always remember quality before quantity when looking at the open rate. It is better to have a shorter subscribers list with a high open rate, than a long list of passive or inactive subscribers. 

Tracking your email campaigns can give you great insight into your customers and your prospect database. Once you have identified what metrics and testing methods are best for your brand, your campaigns will shine!

Have a nice week!

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