How do you measure the success of an email marketing campaign? Most marketers regard open rates and click rates as the holy grail of an email campaign. This is not only a misleading statistic, but also steers your optimization in the wrong direction.
Of course, you cannot succeed in email marketing without more people opening your email and clicking your links. However, focusing on just these two metrics and optimizing your campaigns accordingly would mean marketers don’t measure the metric that actually matters – the actual sales that happen from the campaign.
A newsletter is not a standalone commodity. It is part of a larger email marketing campaign to create a build-up about your product, establish credibility about your business, showcase the success your past customers have had and then making the pitch to sell your product.
A campaign is thus a series of several messages sent over a period of several weeks to translate a subscriber into a paying customer. This build-up is not possible without engaging your email subscribers. How do you ensure customers stay glued to your messages sent across several weeks till you make the pitch? The following tips should help.
Create continuity
Newsletters sent as part of an email marketing campaign are often disjointed in that there is no continuity among the messages sent to the customer. What this does is it fails to sustain the build-up you need to create while generating a sale. One example is setting the campaign in such a way that a newsletter showcasing your major customers is followed by another highlighting a case study. This way, you can offer a brief snapshot about the case study while discussing the customer in the first newsletter, and take it from there in the second. This helps weave a connection between the two newsletters. Doing this ensures subscribers look forward to reading the next newsletter as opposed to stumbling across it while clearing their inbox.
Include Impromptu Messages beside Autoresponders
An email marketing campaign cannot succeed only through the use of auto-responders. Most marketers assume that they can simply “set and forget” such automated campaigns. Subscribers need to believe that your business is actively engaging with them in order to return the favor. One way to do this is by sending newsletters outside the autoresponder schedule. For instance, you could answer customer queries (that should appeal to the wider audience) in a newsletter message. Doing this once in a while tells customers that you are always around to answer questions and hence they take your newsletters more seriously.
Build Suspense
Ever noticed how newsreaders always show interesting upcoming news stories breaking for the commercials? The objective of these “After the break…” snippets is to build suspension about what’s to come. This keeps the customers engaged even when a commercial break is on. As a marketer, you must build a similar suspense to what is to come in your next newsletter. This ensures that your subscribers look forward to reading the next email.
The tips above directly impact the open rates and click rates on your email marketing campaigns. But beyond these tangible metrics, they help build a continuum which is so very essential while selling a product. The true test of customer engagement in email marketing comes from measuring the conversion rates. And that is the metric you must measure while determining the success of your campaign.
