How smart is your e-mail marketing campaign?

When we say that our email is smart, we mean not at all its mental abilities. It's about measuring basic metrics and how to email marketing at all.

Launching an email campaign without knowing how to promote and manage it is like chopping down a tree without an ax. You put in a lot of effort, but the result is not very much.

Therefore, tracking the numbers will give you an accurate estimate of what you are doing right or wrong. It will also help you understand if you are moving in the right direction.

Let's figure out together how to work with this mysterious concept and try to apply it in practice.

What is Email Marketing Plan Includes?

When evaluating the success of mass mailing, we must rely not on our inner feelings, but on a well-structured chain of events.

Let's look at the general types of email marketing strategies elements:

1. The first step in building a plan for internet marketing is a complete analysis of the company's business. You must learn strengths and weaknesses, as well as threats and opportunities. This is a classic SWOT analysis. Just break a piece of paper into 4 parts and write down the composing elements in each part.


Example of the template for SWOT analysis



2. Find your target audience. Here you should accurately describe the avatar of the potential client. The role is played by gender, age, marital status, etc. Next, you must understand which of the consumer's needs you can cover, and how you can be useful to him/her. And the most important question is why the client should contact you and what internal objections he/she can face.


3. Define your purpose. To do this, you need to determine measurable (in money, time, or numbers) goals. For digital marketing, this can be increasing traffic on the official website, raising the value of the average check among buyers, or collecting new leads.


Do not forget to limit yourself to numbers and terms, then it becomes clearer what and how to do next.


4. You should build a short-term action plan to address the pressing needs of one marketing campaign. And also think over a long-term plan for a successful marketing policy in all campaigns.

So we conditionally divided our plan into marketing strategy and marketing tactics in order to understand how to make email marketing effective.

What is Email Marketing Tactics?

These are just actions aimed at solving problems and determining the success of one mailing within the framework of a large campaign. But they should not be forgotten, since the big picture consists of many small important elements.

When building short-term objectives, we advise you to track the following campaign success indicators:

• Open rate.

This metric will not demonstrate to you if your email campaign was successful or failed. But it will show how many people, in principle, look at your letters.

The theory of reader behavior is influenced by many factors, but the most significant ones include the name of the sender and the subject line. Also, don't hassle about previews. To catch the reader's attention and get them to open the letter, it must be informative, concise, and intriguing.

• Click trough rate.

This indicator reflects user engagement. This is the number of clicks on any clickable element in the email. Whether it's a link, a call button, or a picture.

To improve this metric, you should:

• Pay attention to the subject line. Because, this is the first thing that a person sees, even before opening an email. Add emoji to increase Open rate.
• Also, you should take care of a user-friendly interface so that the buttons and links or clickable photos are clearly visible and easy to click on.

Example of using emoji in subject lines

• Click to Open Rate.

Almost the same as CTR, but there is a slight difference that radically changes the whole analysis. The difference is that CTOR takes into account the number of clicks, as well as the number of people who clicked. This indicator will show how high-quality the content is, and how much the user interacts with the company through the letter.

CTOR= (CTR/OR)*100%

Let's imagine a situation.

Data for the task:

• The first email campaign among 50 recipients was opened by about 5 people (OR), and 4 clicks (CTR) were made on the links.
• The second one was also received by 50 people, but 25 readers (OR) opened it. There were 10 clicks (CTR) on the links.

Outcome:

This means that the CTR and OR of the first email are lower than the second. Does it mean that it is better? Not at all.

Now we will calculate the CTOR of the first one email. For this, divide the number of clicks in newsletters by the number of openings and multiply by 100%. This turns out to be 80%. In the second letter campaign CTOR is only 40%.

Conclusion:

And now what to do when the second letter was better in OR and CTR, but the first in CTOR? It's simple, it means that in the second case the reader was attracted by the title, and in the first by the content itself.

To improve email CTOR, it is worth paying special attention to UI / UX when designing email blasts.

• Conversion Rate.

A very important metric in email marketing. This is an indicator that displays the number of targeted actions performed. This can be registration for a webinar, downloading materials from a link, registering on a sender's or partner's website, purchasing a product or service, etc.

It is calculated by the ratio of targeted actions to open letters.

CR= (Target action/OR)*100%

How to improve the CR:

• Use welcome emails, a chain of consecutive emails, an abandoned cart streak, and subscriber reactivation to increase this.
• Personalize every email campaign based on interests, holidays and great deals based on the pages viewed.
• Motivate with discounts, bonuses or free shipping or a free trial lesson.

Sample email advertising campaign based on clients preferences

• Unsubscribe rate.

Never neglect the number of people who decided to unsubscribe from your mailing.

If a person does not want to receive information, then something is wrong with the newsletter, and it clearly is not for this audience.

The unsubscribe ratio is calculated as the ratio of unsubscribed to delivered emails.

“Unsubscribe rate = (Unsubscribed/delivered emails)*100%”

The normal indicator is 0.5%. You need to worry when it is above 1%.

How to downgrade UR level:

• In order to avoid rising the unsubscribe level, do not abuse advertising (selling mailings).
• Add just some useful and interesting content.
• You can also invite subscribers to choose how often they receive emails. To do this, you just need to insert a form with the main questions in your welcome email.

An example of an email with a guide for choosing gifts

• Spam complaints.

The most unpleasant thing for mailing is getting into spam.

Because the ability to conduct mail campaigns depends on it. If the level of spam complaints exceeds 0.5%, then your IP may be completely blocked by mail services, and the newsletters will not even reach the recipient.

To avoid a high spam complaint rate, do the following:

• Always add an unsubscribe link to the letter, because this is a voluntary choice of the reader.
• Use double-opt-in. Send your contact base a transaction newsletter asking to confirm the email address. This will help you avoid invalid emails.
• Avoid spam words in your email composition. Because these are all letters scanned by the postal services. And emails with the presence of forbidden words go to spam forever.
• Systematically clean your contact database from invalid addresses and people who have unsubscribed.

• Net Promote Scope.

This metric reflects the level of loyalty of your customers and the quality of your content. How do you know if your subscriber is satisfied with your bulk mailing? That's right, ask him/her about it. A simple question "Would you recommend us to your friends or relatives?" will fully answer this metric.

If there are less than three out of ten positive answers , then your newsletter is, to put it mildly, bad. If the indicator is 4-6, then the emails are of satisfactory quality. And, accordingly, if the level of answers is 6-10, the bulk mailing is a very good quality.

How to increase your yes answer rate:

• Make it a rule for yourself to conduct these surveys all the time.
• After answering, thank the person or ask a leading question about how you can improve the service / product, and so on.

Example of a survey letter with bonuses

• Bounce rate

The bounce rate affects your mailing budget in direct proportion, as does the trust in the IP address.

And if this happened due to temporary interruptions on the Internet, then this is a natural bounce rate (soft bounce). But if you send letters to non-existent, invalid addresses and so on, then this is already a heavy failure (hard bounce). At the second occasion it can attract special attention from postal services. This way you can easily turn into a spammer and your emails will never end up in the Primary folder.

How to deal with it:

• Use a quality contact base.
• Check the list of recipients systematically for validity using special services or programs.
• If the base is nevertheless purchased, then do not be lazy to spend a small amount of money for emails verification.
• Use specialized mailing software. Most of them automatically filter out addresses with incorrect syntax, corporate emails etc.

Let's summarize tactical methods:

Stick to these ideas for email marketing to succeed in your email blasting:

• Measure the main marketing metrics,
• Always check the validity of the customer base,
• Use high-quality software for sending emails.

What is email marketing Strategy

Strategic marketing is already a more global thing. It is considered not at the level of one email campaign, but for the total period of mailings and their payback.

These goals are separated by their longevity and consistency. Here you need to draw up a plan for expenses and profits for a year, or even more.

What strategy email marketing includes:

1) Customer acquisition cost

This metric is the initial step after defining your audience. It is calculated as the difference between the money that the client will be willing to bring to your company and the amount of budget that you had to spend to attract him/her.

CAC= Revenue - Costs of acquisition

All channels of distribution of information and advertising of the company are taken into account here.

How to optimize this indicator:

• Work on the attractiveness of your official website or content platform.
• Make sure you have a well-written CTA. After all, the main goal is to get the desired action from the lead.
• Get all advertising channels in order. Use various methods of notifying the consumer: Facebook or Google advertising, mailing, bulk SMS, etc.
• Find detailed consumer information. To simplify this task, you can use whois email extractor.

2) Customer retention cost

Also known as LTV (life-time value). This is a metric that displays how much it costs us "content" per subscriber. It is calculated as the ratio of money received from a client to the cost of communicating with him or advertising for this particular type of audience.

“CRC=Income from 1 person/costs per 1 person”

For email campaigns, this indicator includes sending out promotional offers, related emails with useful content, rehabilitation emails, and so on.

To optimize CRC, follow these rules:

• Track customer behavior: their preferences and major purchases.
• Send out surveys asking about your buyer's interests.
• Use consistency in your email newsletter.

3) Return on investment

The ROI is an indicator of the feasibility of an email marketing campaign. To calculate it, you need to divide all income for a certain period of time (usually a year or a quarter) by all costs.

The costs in this formula depend on the sales funnel when you calculate all the tactical indicators, subscriber acquisition and retention costs.

“ROI=Total income/Total costs”

This metric can only be assessed after a lengthy e-campaign.

How to improve ROI:

• Calculate tactical metrics in a timely manner for each email campaign.
• Maintain your subscriber acquisition and retention costs.
• Work on the brand name, its recognition and product quality.

Sum up evaluating the effectiveness of email marketing

It is difficult to make your newsletter "smart" only at first glance. All you need to do is follow simple rules:

• Track subscriber satisfaction;
• Keep your customer base clean;
• Don't forget about basic metrics after every email you send;
• Evaluate sensibly your capabilities and desires;
• Use software for mailing that can be tested

If you are a young business and don't know how to make email marketing more effective, our team will help you with this.

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Written by:

Наталия Шморгун