Posted: May 24, 2021
Email marketing is a bread-and-butter staple of a solid digital marketing strategy. But firing off an email and hoping for the best is not actually a strategy.
Think about how many emails that you receive in your personal inbox.
How many do you delete without opening?
How many do you read a subject line, determine its uninteresting, and then delete?
How many do you scan for a few seconds and then delete without clicking on anything?
That is the worst-case scenario for an email marketer. However, with a solid strategy, goals for measuring metrics, and a constant cycle of improvement, any email marketer can build an email campaign that scores as much as 4400% on the ROI.
Start with a Goal
When you’re building an email campaign, you always want to have a goal in mind. This goal will drive the structure of the campaign, the look and feel of the individual emails, the verbiage and visual content of individual emails, and the direction of the CTA’s you’ll use to push leads to take action towards your goal. Goals can include things like:
- Driving traffic to your website
- Landing page conversions
- Raising brand awareness
- Increasing sales and revenue
- Nurturing customer loyalty
- Previous customer reconversion
It’s best to stick with one goal for each campaign so that the recipients of your emails have a clear insight into what they are supposed to do or get from each email.
Calculate Your Spend and Gain
ROI, or return on investment, is a simple calculation: (Gain – costs)/costs= ROI.
Costs for email marketing include a marketer’s time and the cost of email marketing software or technology. You can calculate this for a single campaign, across a month, or even across an entire year. It depends on what is the most useful for your team.
Gains are what is earned by converting a lead from an email. Are you selling a good or service? Bingo, that’s how you calculate the gains from the email campaign. Using your CRM software to track what each converted lead brought in from their sale is what you can use in your equation to calculate your ROI.
Naturally, if your campaign was more about brand awareness than lead conversion or increasing sales, the gains will be a lot lower than an email sent to leads about an upcoming sale or new product launch. But even brand awareness campaigns have their purpose and can convert. With a strongly tailored contact list for leads in the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey, a good brand awareness email along with more personalized content can convert them into leads. And that leads to sales and higher ROI.
What About Other Value?
Monetary ROI isn’t the only metric worth tracking from an email campaign. While having hard, cold numbers to back up your email marketing campaign is awesome, email marketing can serve multiple purposes beyond strict sales numbers.
Brand Awareness is one major benefit that email marketing provides. If your goal is lead generation or building a more robust contact list, having an email campaign that generates new leads will be especially helpful in the future. Getting website visitors to sign up for coupons or newsletters is a great way to do this. It might even lead to a sale!
Collecting feedback through surveys can help with future product and service launches while improving customer satisfaction. Implementing automatic workflows that collect customer feedback or email short surveys after a sale is perfect for ensuring consistent feedback. If you are a B2B company, having an annual campaign to collect feedback from your customers is another tactic to improve customer service experience and maybe even get new ideas for future products and services.
Generating traffic towards your website or social channels for more effective future campaigns is also a worthy campaign endeavor. A company website can be the lifeblood of any digital marketing campaign. Getting organic traffic is always the goal, but pushing people to your website from social channels, blogs, email campaigns, influencers, digital ads, etc. can all be part of a broader campaign.
Email marketing should still be a strong component of your digital marketing approach, even if it seems “outdated” or complicated. You can always outsource your email marketing needs to an agency like us so you barely need to think about it!