6 strategies to optimize your email campaigns for better ROI and customer loyalty
Email marketing is practiced by almost all companies irrespective of size or shape. It is an effective tool for lead generation, customer engagement, and retention. Studies figured that for every $1 spent on email, one can expect an average return of $42 (DMA, 2019). However, many companies fail to optimize email programs effectively and encounter problems like poor delivery rate, low open and click rates, high un-subscription rate, and low post-click activity. If you are one among them, here’s our 6-step guide to strategize your email marketing programs for increased customer engagement, conversion, and loyalty.
1. Situation Analysis
- What is your current strategy?
- What are the goals and benchmarks defined?
- How are your competitors approaching their email campaigns?
- How do their email templates look like and what is the result they are getting?
These questions need to be answered as the first step. Situation analysis can identify your business capabilities, customer behavior, competitors, and all the external and internal factors that influence your business growth. Upon clearly analyzing it, you can set attainable benchmarks for your email campaigns to work.
2. Define Objectives
After analysis, you need to define objectives and goals. Goals can be anything from increasing brand awareness, click rate, signups or subscription rate, customer spends, customer loyalty, etc. The key to achieving these goals lies in consistently engaging your customers with periodic follow-up and offering a personalized experience based on their previous activity. Additionally, you need to list down KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and monitor the progress. It is advisable to do A/B testing on the email messages to get a deep understanding of the way your customers think and behave.
3. Refine Strategy
With a proper email marketing calendar, you can plan better on when to send emails for every new product or promotion and reach your audience at the right time. Email calendars can be of great use for businesses that have multiple branches or run by different teams. Email calendars can,
- Provide a single view into the email strategy and execution.
- Avoid overlapping mails.
- Meet deadlines.
- Help track your sends and monitor the progress.
4. Select Tools
Email campaigns can get tedious in the longer run. Hence, email marketing tools enable you to launch, schedule, and track marketing campaigns across various channels easily. Campaign management tools can help you to,
- Segment your audience better.
- Measure the success of A/B testing.
- Monitor the progress.
- Handle a vast number of multistage campaigns.
- Implement personalized or customized follow-up based on customer engagement.
5. Build Campaigns
Once you define the right tool, you can build campaigns with respect to your goals. Draft a mail copy, add a stunning artwork, set up tracking and add to the emails, do test runs, and sent out at the most relevant time. You can also try using a CRM wherein you can personalize the content in your emails like the first name or the company name to ensure your customers feel like they are being personally addressed.
6. Review Performance
Once the email is sent, review its performance by checking the open rate, click rate, response emails, clicks to your landing pages, bounce rates, the number of people who signed-up or filled a form, made the purchase, downloaded the lead magnet or a coupon, etc. The effectiveness of the email campaigns lies in the size of your email list, quality of the contacts, and how well you keep tabs on your spam complaints.
By strategically optimizing your email campaigns, you can,
- Improve your brand identity
- Increase online conversions
- Reduce churn rate
- Improve Customer Life-Time Value
Download our complimentary email campaign checklist. This helps you to stay more organized, ensure that you don’t skip any process, avoid repetitive work, act quickly and effectively.
A study conducted by McKinsey & Co figured that email marketing acquired 40 times more customers than Facebook and Twitter combined and all these strategies enable you to get the maximum out of your email campaigns.
If you need more help in strategizing your current email campaigns, setting up the KPIs, implementing a CRM, or improve the performance, talk to our digital marketing experts today.
