Email is one of the few channels that allows you direct, personalised communications with your customer. It’s also extremely cost effective and should be part of every marketer’s toolkit.
Here are 3 simple ways you can start to optimise your email marketing campaigns to increase it’s ROI even further.
Start benchmarking
This is the key step to optimising any marketing campaign you have. If you don’t know where you stand with your campaigns, you don’t know which way leads to improvement. Start by plotting these (bare minimum) metrics into a spreadsheet everytime you send a campaign: emails sent, bounce rate, unsubscribes, unique opens, total opens, total clicks, unique clicks.
Once you’ve got these stats, you can start comparing them with industry stats to see where you are and how far you are off (or above average).
Source: Email Marketing Benchmark Report 2008, MarketingProfs
Do some testing
Once you start tracking your stats, you can start conducting small tests to see their effect on your email campaigns. Most email marketing service providers have A/B split testing which allows you to send 2 slighly different versions of your email campaign. Stuff you can test include:
- Subject line – long or short, tone, should you include an offer in the subject
- Personalisation – greet with ‘Dear name’
- Creative elements – colours and shapes of buttons, images with or without faces, etc
- Time – early or late in the week, before or after lunch
Stop the hard sell
Like I mentioned in the beginning of this post, email is a channel that allows you to connect directly the customer. It is a pretty intimate relationship compared to your busy website or social networks where customers are being distracted by Restaurant City or Pet Society.
You need to foster this relationship. The fastest way to kill this relationship is to hard sell in your emails. Imagine you are emailing your mom. Make sure to include useful tips, news about what’s been going on and by the way, did you hear about this offer? Once you change your attitude in this area you’ll begin to see real results in your email campaigns.
Here’s wishing you all the best with your email campaigns. If you need help, do consider engaging a consultant to advise and guide you.
