Source: free Canva
Email has the highest ROI of all marketing channels. However, it’s not as easy as blasting out a few emails and expecting your net to overflow.
Building an email list that makes money isn’t an accident—it takes strategy. Here are five simple ways to get great email marketing ROI.
1. Audit your email marketing to address any issues
You’re just not going to get good returns if your email marketing has issues. And if you’re not looking at your metrics, you can’t get an accurate picture of what’s working and what isn’t.
With a reliable email service provider, tracking engagement metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, click-to-open rates, bounce rates, spam complaints, and unsubscribe rates should be straightforward. Here’s why it matters: enhanced engagement rates are often indicative of greater campaign success. Take a close look at the data. You can’t improve if you don’t know your sticking points.
2. Clean your email list to protect your data and boost ROI
Regular email validation is crucial to maintaining a profitable and communicative email list. Email validation helps you identify and remove harmful data. Email addresses change frequently, and your list degrades by 25% every year. Regularly cleaning it with an email validation service ensures its health and effectiveness.
Find a reputable email validator and use it at least quarterly. Upload the entire list, and it will find all the problematic and invalid email addresses. Get rid of them without delay. If you have signup forms, connect an email validation API to have emails checked in real time and keep bad data off your list.
Keeping your email database clean is a must. Even the most profitable email campaigns will be sullied without routine email scrubbing. Sooner or later, your ROI will take a hit. The costs associated with email validation are an investment that you’ll get back.
3. Use email segmentation to increase your email campaigns ROI
In these times, customers will not tolerate irrelevant messages. When email marketers send emails that are disconnected from the reason a subscriber signed up, it indicates that they don’t care or simply haven’t collected enough information.
Unless your business is very niche, you shouldn’t assume that everyone wants to receive every email you send. Consider a sporting goods company that continues to send emails about skiing and snowboarding gear to a customer in Florida who’s an avid water sports enthusiast. You could potentially drive them away.
The key is to dig into customer data. You must find out what kind of emails your customers want. If what you offer is more exact, you can still segment your audience based on preferences. For some people, getting a few emails a month is excessive. Others may be open to hearing from you twice a week.
When most marketers see the benefits of segmentation, targeting and personalization, they tend to want to do more of it. There’s certainly more work involved. However, you can’t expect to increase ROI with “throw the spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks” marketing. Don’t be intimidated. Just get started. Your email service provider (ESP) should be able to point you in the right direction.
4. Time is short, so keep your emails concise
When email first came into everyday use, there was a novelty factor. Getting an email was exciting. As we chug along into the 21st century, people are experiencing email fatigue and many have trouble keeping up with all of the messages.
According to the ZeroBounce Email Statistics Report, 66% of respondents prefer short emails. “I like to keep my emails short and sweet,” said Emily Ryan of Westfield Creative. The email marketing expert went on: “If people don’t get the gist within the first nine seconds, you haven’t done your job. Use bold, make buttons that stand out or have images that really cause your readers to pause and pay attention.” If your copy is convoluted or you have an unclear CTA, you can’t expect much of a return.
Show your emails to several trusted people on your team or even your roommate or spouse. Do they get it? If they’re not sure or express a different understanding from what you intended, it’s time to go back to the drawing board. “Brevity is the soul of wit,” which is also a key component to engagement and ROI.
5. Want more ROI with email? Give them what they can’t get anywhere else
There was a time when the only way to purchase certain products was to travel to the area where they were found. Some things weren’t even available by mail order. Going on a vacation or cruise might mean that you bought food, clothing, music or tourist merchandise that you could only get in certain places.
Now that we’re well into the internet revolution, virtually everything you can dream of is at your fingertips. This is definitely a plus, but for businesses, it means that you’re not just competing with those in your area. Customers can shop around the country and in some cases, the world.
It’s a challenge, but it also poses an opportunity. Ask yourself: What can you offer that people can’t get anywhere else? If your product or service is not uncommon, strategize what deals you can offer to entice customers while still giving yourself a viable profit.
It’s not about what your customers can do for you. That thinking won’t take you far. “When you find out what you can give your customers, you’ve got the basis for a successful email campaign,” said Brian Minick, Chief Operating Officer at ZeroBounce.
The email deliverability expert went on: “Remember how many options they have. So, make your emails count. If you waste the subscriber’s time, it may be the last email of yours they see.”
With care and creativity, your email may bolster your position in their eyes. They may think of you as not just another email clogging their inbox but instead, a valued message coming from someone they trust and even look forward to.
