Forrester Research found that 89% of marketers said email was their primary channel for lead generation. But of this, what percent of marketers are confident that their email content is relevant, personalized and going to the right people, at the right time?
Many marketers continue to use email as a main channel for brand awareness, content promotion and lead generation. But without analyzing or iterating on email strategies, you could be hurting rather than helping your brand.
Email marketing can prove to be more time consuming than one’s initial intention. From debating a subject line to crafting an opening sentence or fine-tuning the main CTA (call to action), marketers can spend too much time on the email’s tone and aesthetic that two crucial things can often be overlooked: who receives the email and how to measure email success.
In our recently released Effective Email Marketing guide, we dive deep into how today’s leading marketers are balancing their creative campaign strategies with the technical expertise to understand how to reach the right audience at the right time. (Tweet this)
Stop and think before sending your next email campaign — take these steps to ensure you are executing an effective and accurate email campaign:
- Take Control of Your Data — In our State of Salesforce report, we found that data is the second largest business challenge that all executives face. With this in mind, marketers must learn to not shy away from dirty data, but instead build a culture and strategy around achieving clean data. It is time for IT and marketing to partner together in building agreed upon data hygiene strategies that account for more than just form-fill data. To achieve a consistently clean database, you must know how and from where data can enter the system in order to build a consistent strategy to monitor ongoing data cleanliness.
Research found that employing consistent data hygiene will generate 7x the number of inquiries and 4x the number of leads (Tweet this)
- Segment Your Audience — Once your prospect and customer data is consistent and accurate, you can segment each type of buyer along their unique buying journey. Identify how and who you want to segment; for instance, grouping customers based on their persona, their geographic region, or perhaps their buying patterns and frequencies. This is the point where you can confidently bring personalization into your emails. With accurate segmentation, you should now be confident to target email content based on the readers’ industry, geography or event role within their organization.
eMarketer found that practicing list segmentation can see as much as…
- 24% better email deliverability
- 39% better open rates
- 28% lower opt-out & unsubscribe rates
- Define Campaign Success — Overwhelmed marketers are guilty of sending email campaigns out to their database without any plan to analyze the performance of the email. This mentality wastes a lost of insight into your customers actions and interests.
- Do you know what your average open rate is? Or more importantly, your unsubscribe rate?
- Have you defined what an engagement contact looks like versus a disengaged contact in your database?
Without analyzing the performance of your emails or how your segmented audience is responding to these emails, how do you gain insight into the actual effectiveness of your marketing? It is essential to note that prior to tracking your current email metrics, you must benchmark your past email performance. It’s impossible to track future success without having an idea of how engaged the current database is with your brand.
Silverpop found that…
- 25% is at average a healthy open rate
- 1% should be a maximum unsubscribe rate
Before building your next email program, remember these three steps to achieve an effective and successful campaign. Download our guide for an easy to follow checklist the next time you executive an email campaign. Make the time you spend writing an email worthwhile; build an engaged and segmented audience, and measure the email engagement to gage strategies for innnovation on your next campaign.
