Email Marketing Strategy and Monitoring

An email marketing strategy is a set of procedures that a marketer identifies and follows to achieve desired marketing goals with email advertising. This plan of action gives the businesses a direct channel of communication with prospects and customers for brand promotion.

Strategies

Set email marketing goals

Marketing emails serve to fulfill the following purposes:

• increase customer engagement
• raise loyalty
• maximize ROI
• maintain relationships with your clients

Pick the necessary email marketing tools

Finding the right tools is the first step to setting up an email marketing strategy. A marketer needs an Email Service Provider (ESP) with an automation tool, among other useful features.

SendPulse allows you to create, organize, and send emails in a breeze. With Automation 360, marketers can follow up on their customers and send the right emails at the right time. For instance, you can set up welcome emails for onboarding new customers, abandoned cart emails to get customers to take action about the items they have left in the cart, and so forth. Register right now to launch your email marketing strategy with SendPulse.

Determine the target audience

Next, the marketer needs to build their email subscriber list. To do this, you have to identify the target audience your company serves. Case in point, if a specific business deals with baby clothes, then its target audience primarily comprises mothers-to-be. Thus, it makes sense to use conventional means to get the email addresses of this demographic.

Identify the appropriate list building tactics

An excellent way of building mailing lists is through subscriptions. With SendPulse, you can add subscription forms to your site and collect quality subscribers who are ready to hear from your brand. You can embed subscription forms on high-traffic sections of your website.

Divide your mailing list into segments

Segmenting is an effective tactic that allows you to send highly targeted email campaigns. With SendPulse, marketers can segment their mailing lists based on location, gender, occupation, age, behavior, etc. In turn, you can be sure that you are delivering appropriate and customized messages that appeal to customers.

Identify the types of emails to send

There’s a great variety of different emails that marketers send. The choice of email style depends on the aim of each specific campaign. For example, if a user has just joined your mailing list, send them a welcome email. This is a great chance to explain the benefits of working with you. If clients have added some items to their shopping cart and didn’t buy them, send them an abandoned cart email to increase sales. Discover more about email campaign types.

Create a schedule for sending emails

To ensure that subscribers read your promotional emails, find out the best time for sending emails. It is, therefore, necessary to experiment and determine the time when subscribers are most engaged. A/B testing proves useful.

Format the email content

For email marketing to be a success, messages in promotional emails should be presented perfectly. Marketers should choose formats, fonts, and text sizes depending on the type of emails that they are creating. With SendPulse, you can use a drag-and-drop editor to create beautiful email templates that are customized to match your brand.

Optimize your emails

A 2017 study by Adestra concluded that 83.8 percent of mobile device owners open emails with these devices. It, therefore, makes sense to optimize email content for mobile to reach this audience. Some of the ways for assuring that email content is mobile-friendly include:

• Creating short subject lines.
• Limiting emails to a width of 600px.
• Using single-column templates.
• Displaying small images.
• Writing distinct CTAs.
• Testing on multiple mobile devices.
• Avoiding menu bars.
• Using a large font size (ideally 13-14 pixels).

Conduct split-testing

With A/B testing, marketers can determine what copy of their email works best by swapping out different aspects of their email, such as subject lines (the most popular option), images, CTAs, headlines, offers, and so forth.

Monitor email performance reports

Adjusting your email strategy based on reports and feedback that you have gathered is the last step for developing an email marketing strategy. SendPulse provides users with a set of analytics that aids in gauging the effectiveness of email campaigns. Track email open rate, unsubscribe rate, click-through rates, email deliveries, email bounces, spam complaints, and more.

Monitoring

Overall ROI

Overall ROI is an email metric every marketer should track. It tells you the overall return on investment for your campaigns.

You can calculate this by taking the money you made in sales from the campaign minus the money you spent to execute the campaign, divide that by the money invested in the campaign, and then multiply that by 100.

Email sharing rate

The email sharing rate indicates how many times a recipient shared your email through their social media, but has nothing to do with sharing the email through email.

This metric is calculated through the “share this” button on your email. To find this rate, divide the amount of “share this” clicks by the number of total emails delivered, then multiply by 100.

Engagement over time

Tracking engagement over time will give you information on the best times of day to send messages.

You can utilize automation in your email service provider to send emails based on customer behavior or trigger, but tracking engagement over time will tell you when you get the highest open rates and click rates for emails that are not automated.

Forwarding rate/email sharing

Forwarding rate/email sharing measures the percentage of recipients who either shared your post via social media or forwarded it to a friend.

Forwarding rate or sharing is a helpful metric to track because it gives you an idea of how many brand advocates you have. It tells you what percentage of subscribers are recommending your emails to others.

Spam complaints

It can be very discouraging for your emails to get marked as spam. You may prefer to ignore these instances but it’s important to pay attention to spam complaints.

Email service providers want to ensure quality and track spam complaints. If this rate gets too high, it’s possible your email service provider will take action against you and block your account.

List growth rate

List growth rate is the metric to track the rate at which your list is growing.

You can calculate this by taking the number of new subscribers minus the number of unsubscribes, then divide that by the total number of email addresses on your list, and then multiply it by 100.

Number of unsubscribes

Measuring unsubscribes is very simple. Any email provider will tell you how many people unsubscribed upon receiving an email from you. This email metric can usually be found in your main dashboard or your metrics dashboard.

A high number of unsubscribes can be discouraging. However, email marketers prioritize this email marketing metric and often view unsubscribes as a good thing because they indicate that you are fine-tuning your subscriber list.

Bounce rate

When sending an email campaign, you also want to track the bounce rate. Bounce rate measures how many subscriber email addresses didn’t receive your email. Soft bounces track temporary problems with email addresses and hard bounces track permanent problems with email addresses.

Measuring bounce rates against open rates will give you a more solid idea of the quality of your subscriber lists. If you have a high percentage of hard bounces, your list may be full of fake email addresses, old email addresses, or addresses with mistakes in them.

Conversion rate

Your click-through rate measures how many people clicked your link, while your conversion rate will assess how many people clicked on the link and then completed a specific action. For example, if you included a link in your email for your subscribers to participate in a Black Friday sale, the conversion rate would tell you what percentage of the people who clicked the link made a purchase.

Conversion rates give you unique insight into your return on investment. When you know how much you have spent and how many subscribers are converting, it’s easier to determine whether or not the money you are putting into your campaign is paying off.

Click-through rate (CTR)

CTR is another common metric that can help you determine how well your campaigns are performing. CTR measures how many people clicked on the links in your email. For example, if you included a link to redeem an offer, the CTR would measure what percentage of subscribers clicked on your links.

When crafting an email, there are a few ways to increase click-through rates. For instance, include links throughout the email in appropriate places and add an eye-catching and conspicuous call-to-action button that subscribers can click on to redeem your offer.

Open rate

Open rate is the simplest email marketing KPI and is vital to understanding how well your subscribers are receiving your messages. The open rate tracks how many subscribers opened the email you sent.

Open rates can give you insight into the success of your subject line copy. For example, studies show subject lines that use subscribers’ first names are 26% more likely to be opened. Other strategies, like using emoticons in subject lines or keeping subject lines direct and short, can increase open rates as well.