Email Marketing — How to Optimize Campaigns?

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a form of marketing strategy that makes the customers/recipients aware of company’s products, offers, and other services. It can also be a soft sell approach to educate audience about brand value with the help of lead magnet content & keep them engaged between purchases. Emails are the most cost-effective way to promote, communicate with customers and reach business goals.

“Today, most marketers don’t notice, track, or interact with people until they are customers.” — Seth Godin

Why is Email Marketing efficient?

Email marketing allows businesses to improve their reach and visibility, allowing them to engage and convert more leads on a consistent basis. Emails help to reach a large group of people and can also offer benefits that other digital marketing tactics often can’t provide.

Here are some of the key advantages of Email marketing campaigns:

• High ROI (Return On Investment)
• Scalable
• Easy to measure
• Control over personalization & segmentation
• Build relationship with customers
• Active channel to acquire new customers
• Drive traffic to other marketing channels
• Real-time results (automation, triggers, dynamic content etc.)

and many more!

How to Optimize campaigns?

As per a recent analysis conducted by Campaign Monitor on email marketing benchmarks — customers continue to be most engaged through email marketing; and emails are bringing in major ROI for companies.

Source: Campaign Monitor

If a business is looking to execute Email Marketing strategy, the following are the best practices for consideration while setting up campaigns:

1. Solid Marketing strategy

First and foremost, an email marketing strategy is very important to streamline efforts and enhance results. Here are a few key points:

• Review of previous campaign data and finding out areas of improvement
• Brainstorming different campaign efforts — Email communication, Paid social, Social media marketing etc.
• Deeper understanding of the product/ service
• Evaluating the target audience
• Researching the market and how to stand out
• Compelling content for the campaigns
• Following-up/ Re-marketing efforts for those who might have slipped through the cracks
• Effective design elements

2. Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation technology allows Marketing & Sales teams to manage marketing activities and multi-functional campaigns by automating several processes to increase revenue & maximize operational efficiency. Automating processes has a many components such as — Smart lists, Batches, Triggers for transactional & operational emails, Subscriptions, Segmentation, Alert emails, UTM tracking, Tag manager, Tokens & Variables, Calendar files, etc., many of which can be implemented using tools such as Marketo, Pardot, Mailchimp, HubSpot to name a few. Including automation in your marketing campaigns will also help with streamlining manual efforts for the most time-consuming tasks.

3. Data privacy protection policies

One of the most imperative considerations while launching an email marketing campaign is awareness of data privacy laws that are relevant to the business. If the product/ service is launching globally, strict data privacy guidelines with private customer data such as GDPR, CAN-SPAM, CASL, CCPA etc., must be followed. Failure in doing so could result in significant financial penalties and damage to your brand reputation.

4. Target Data

As a marketer, use of data to fuel and drive campaigns is key. Working on gathering and segmenting the target data based on personas, industry type, job function, geography, age etc. should be prioritized. Data segmentation and consequent Email personalization can not only improve open & click-through rates but also, overall campaign performance.

5. Personalized Campaign Assets

Personalizing assets such as emails, landing pages, follow-up communications etc., is crucial to stand out and improve customer experience. Sending emails that are catered to recipient’s specific requirements or with customized information can increase customer engagement and drive traffic to websites/ other resources to boost sales.

Few aspects to look at while personalizing campaign programs are:

• Segment email lists (like we discussed in the previous topic..)
• Building customer personas & journey maps
• Setting up automated behavioural actions and triggers
• Sending communication at the right time, making use of region & location data
• Working on dynamic content on landing pages & emails
• Steering customers to helpful content such as relevant products, process documentation, resource manuals etc.

6. A/B Testing

Conducting A/B tests for emails are the best way to run different variations of campaign options and to work out which is most effective. Usually, in A/B tests, the same campaign with two different components are sent to a small percentage of target list, both of which are then evaluated based on open/click rates, and the winning email is sent to the rest of the list. Following this can ensure improved content & user engagement, high conversions, lesser bounce rates and so on. A few components that could be included in A/B tests are: Subject lines, Graphics, Content, CTAs etc.

7. UTM parameters

Email campaigns are the one of the most versatile marketing strategies to garner sales for business with lead-generation and retargeting efforts. However, they can be made much more robust and effective with the help of detailed insights into every email’s performance. This can be accomplished by use of UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters such as utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term and utm_content in emails’ URLs to track campaign traffic. This data will help with post-campaign reporting and is very important to update in the database for future re-marketing campaigns.

8. Lead Scoring

It is beneficial for campaigns to focus on building a database of Marketing Qualified leads (MQLs) by implementing Lead scoring logic.

Lead Scoring is an automated process that assigns points to leads in the database based on actions taken that reflects their conversion potential and level of interest in the business.

By doing so, the team will be able to send the right emails to the most eligible audience which will help convert to prospects and eventually, customers. If efforts are not aligned towards reaching the right people, it will not only affect the overall numbers of the campaign; but will also lead to being flagged as spam by customers with dissimilar interests.

9. Strong liaison between Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing are two business functions within an organisation — they both impact lead generation and revenue. The term, sales, refers to all activities that lead to the selling of goods and services. And marketing is the process of getting people interested in the goods and services being sold.

Considering that sales and marketing teams work towards the same goal, keeping both teams updated with certain overlapping metrics is crucial. Some of the processes that need to be well laid out are — Shared reporting process for leads/prospects , Well-defined SLAs for Lead generation, understanding of Marketing qualified or Sales qualified leads for nurture campaigns etc.

To conclude:

These are a few important considerations to ensure the most effective marketing campaigns and to successively contribute towards improved sales. Apart from these, there are a lot more TOFU (top of the funnel) and MOFU (middle of the funnel) processes that can be put in place to accelerate overall results.

Overall, having a solid strategy, proper execution and stage-by-stage analysis will lead to a successful email marketing campaign.