Improving email marketing performance

Improving email marketing performance comes down to employing housekeeping steps to ensure that your email lists are up to date, properly categorizing and segmenting subscribers, personalizing emails to each recipient, and becoming proactive in delivering relevant content and information to those who have decided to give you their attention.

If you’re reading this you probably have a clear idea of what email marketing is and you’re probably using it at this point. Furthermore, you probably also know it is an effective and comprehensive marketing strategy that you can use singularly or in combination with other marketing tactics such as remarketing, and prospecting. When you’ve taken the time to put together an email marketing strategy, and you’ve invested the time and effort to plan how and where you acquire subscribers, you certainly want to ensure that it performs optimally.

And so keeping an account of your open rates, click-through rates, spam complaints, unsubscribe rates, and other key performance indicators are the prerequisite steps towards improving email marketing performance and getting the result that the strategy can bring forth. Let’s drill down a bit further on this.

4 steps to improving email marketing performance.

Ok, so Let’s review the four crucial steps that helps to improve email marketing performance and provide measurement tools with which you can assess outcomes of your marketing campaign in total but also with each individual campaign send out you do.

Improve email message personalization

Since we’ve taking the time to acquire the names and the emails of our visitors, and since our visitors have subscribed with their names and email addresses, we want to utilize that information towards the personalization of the emails that we send. And most email marketing platforms such as MailChimp, offers us the ability to automatically insert the individual names of each of our subscribers in the emails we send out.

But personalization goes beyond putting the subscribers name or birthday in the information we send out. Personalization is really about making sure that we are engaging as a person to another person. All too often sometimes we can get lost in the whole marketing process and marketing system, and we begin to look at our subscribers as just another data point to be fed into our system.

Keeping aware of how we are engaging our subscribers / customers and adjusting the point of reference is a constant necessity especially in marketing. So that we don’t fall into the mindset of looking at people as data points to be collected and processed.

Make it easy to unsubscribe

You’ve invariably gotten emails that you did not want however on top of that you find out that whoever sent it doesn’t make it very easy to unsubscribe. And so your frustration and irritation turns to the brand, the product, or the service that’s being advertised, or communicated in that email.

This can create a negative experience between customers and you. So when improving email marketing performance, when we create an email campaign we certainly want to make it easy for our subscribers to unsubscribe.

Although we don’t want that event to happen, it’s certainly not something that we desire, at the end of the day, it’s really about what our subscribers want. Because if we get subscribers that do unsubscribe, then it really only makes our list much more focused and much more tuned to those engaged subscribers that are still part of our list. And it minimizes the negative experiences that we may create if we make it difficult for our customers to unsubscribe.

Track the results of your email marketing

In the opening paragraph we talked about open rates, click-through rates, spam complaints, unsubscribe rates, and other key performance indicators. When improving email marketing performance, these are indicators, events that are part of our email marketing strategy that we want to track and understand.

In everything that we can measure, including email marketing, there are indicators that help us to assess if we are moving in the right direction or the wrong direction. These indicators are information that helps us to refine, and optimize our efforts towards the things that are working out.

And so for instance if you find that on a certain type of subject you’re sending out, that the click-through rate or the open rate is lower than you would like, or lower than other subjects, then that gives you information. Perhaps people are not interested in that particular subject, then you can drill down further as to why, or pivot into a subject or product that is more enticing and which your customers / subscribers are more apt to engage with. And you can only do this by tracking the results of your email marketing.

Have a clear objective for each email.

Having a clearly defined objective in an email send out that your subscribers are going to read, is the same as having a goal and a reason with which your subscribers can take action on, towards an accomplishment. If you simply send out an email that doesn’t have any objective, then what is the point?

Every email should have an objective because firstly it helps you to assess outcomes, also it gives the reader a step towards a concrete action. For instance do you want your customers / subscribers to visit a web page, or call a phone number, or perhaps you want them to complete a form, then within that email that we’re sending out it’s imperative to make that clear so that the reader can decide if they’re going to take that action or not and consequently if that email is going to be successful or not.