How can you improve your email marketing strategy?

In our previous blog posts, we’ve looked at the 7 most popular email marketing metrics that you should be measuring to keep track of your email marketing performance. This blog post will help you focus on email marketing by outlining to keep track of and improve your overall strategy, not just solus emails. This post will show you how can you improve your email marketing strategy?

First of all, you need to:

1. Set your objectives/goals and make sure they’re measurable. For example:

Generate more sales by:

• Converting customers to prospects by xx%
• Upsell and cross-sell to existing customers by xx%

Increase brand engagement/set yourself as a thought-leader in the industry by:

• Improving your content share via social links by xx%
• Improving your content share via forward to a friend links by xx%

Grow your customer intelligence by:

• Having a set of criteria you want to learn about them, directly from them. i.e. through surveys and forms
• Having a set of criteria you want to learn about them, by using advanced features that are part of your email platform and 3^rd party tools that integrate with your ESP

2. Decide what metrics you are going to measure

We suggest starting off with the 7 basic stats

• Open rates, clicks, click-to-open and share rate 
• Delivery rates, bounce rates and net list growth 
• And then look into 6 alternative metrics which we’ll be covering in our ‘Metrics Matter: Beyond the essentials’ guide, which will be published end of April

3. Decide what you’re going to compare/benchmark yourself against

• This could be the best email stats compiled by an industry expert. Check out Dave Chaffey’s article on email marketing statistics 2015
• Doing your own industry or competitor analysis
• Benchmarking against your own email marketing strategy by comparing date ranges. New functionality in dotmailer makes this easy peasy for you to do, like no other ESP

Now take these steps:

1. Use the data you already have to segment your lists (a little segmentation is better than nothing)

• Industry
• Gender
• Location
• Date of birth
• Customer type

2. Use the data you have to personalize your emails as much as possible

• According to Marketing Land who cites research by Experian, a personalized email will lift transaction rates and revenue per email six times higher than non-personalized emails.

3. Collect more data to improve your segmentation rules. For example:

• Email sign up forms
• Website pop-overs
• Customer satisfaction surveys
• Competitions
• Preference center
• Dotdigital insights – use WebInsight  & SocialInsight to learn more about your contact’s engagement and behavior with your website and social influence and Orderinisght to collect their transactional data

4. Use that data for advanced personalization and dynamic content to create engaging and targeted content

• Econsultancy’s Daily Pulse which uses dynamic content based on user preferences

• Boots bringing in your personal points information

5. Use your email marketing reports to build a picture of what makes your customers tick

• What are your best performing subject lines? Check out our latest blog on how you can build that winning subject line using your detailed reporting data
• Which email content categories get the most opens, clicks and conversions?
• What content is getting the most clicks? By grouping your links by topic you can find that out in no time

6. Test and try different things

• But plan what you’ll test, how much and for how long. Don’t test too many things at one time

7. Use a preference center – give your customers a choice of what they want to receive and how frequently

• Marks and Spencer preference center

8. Automate it

Make a list of all your comms and decide what can be automated. Start off with the easiest things like an automated welcome email, website driven engagement (like a whitepaper download) and anniversary based emails etc.

• Boots welcome email

• A Happy Birthday Message from Avon

Then build your way up so you start automating emails like win back, browse/cart abandonment and product replenishment programs.

• Starbucks lapsed customers

• Alexandalexa browse abandonment

• Science in Sport cart abandonment

• Nutrica product replenishment program

It’s good to get to a stage where a good chunk of your comms can be automated so you can spend more time focusing on important solus emails and your email marketing strategy. Free up your time to analyze the results (refer back to your initial goals etc.) and make those all important changes to improve your email marketing strategy performance and ROI.

And that brings us to the end of this blog post – we hope you’ve found it useful. If you want to find out how we can help with your email marketing strategy, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!