The Equation for a Highly Successful Email Campaign
The marketers who uttered the tragic words that email is dead are making a detrimental mistake because email is completely far from being dead. Most marketers, not in the same pool as the aforementioned ones, report that they all have a strong ROI for their email marketing campaigns. MarketingSherpa did a survey this past March and overall marketers saw a 119% return on their email campaigns.
How do these campaigns provide a positive ROI? What are the parts of a highly successful email campaign?
At our Competitive Summit, we were able to discuss more of these tactics with Alexandra Gibson (VP of Marketing at Contactually), Erik Harbison (CMO of Aweber), and Vivek Sharma (CEO of Movable Ink) all leaders in the email marketing space. They are all on different paths in regards to email, but all pointed out the same essential thoughts that combines into an equation leading to a highly successful email campaign. With 56% of businesses saying they plan to increase their use of email marketing, there is only more fuel to create great campaigns.
Relevancy + Relationships + Goals=
A Highly Successful Email Campaign
This equation goes along well with Seth Godin’s idea of “permission marketing” where a company must provide something that is “anticipated, personal and relevant.” Without those things in your email campaign, users won’t hesitate to unsubscribe to your emails, mark your email as spam, or just delete it without ever reading it.
1. Relevancy
Erik Harbison really stressed this point that if you weren’t relevant in your campaigns, you first won’t get anyone to open the email and second your campaigns will just become stale. Relevancy is key for the lifespan of your email, engagement with your subscribers, and ultimately converting them at the right moment. Relevancy in an email campaign is about creating compelling content that your audience wants to consume.
Relevancy was brought up again during the panel in regards to Gmail’s new tabs. All of the panelists were in agreement that they liked the tabs as they help email marketers become more relevant to the subscriber. There are over 425 million Gmail users and the tabs, not only add relevancy to a users inbox, they help marketers target the subscribers who are ready to convert by organizing the inboxes into tabs.
Relevancy can also be implemented through segmentation of your lists in order to send the right set of emails to the specific groups that you segment out.
2. Relationships
One of the points that Alexandra Gibson helped drive home, touched on how she liked the new Gmail tabs, but she went on to saying that they provide content that talks to subscribers and not at them. A conversation involves more than two people and revolves around engaging roles of listening and speaking. That conversation helps to lay the groundwork for the relationship. A relationship doesn’t work if only one person is talking, that’s why email marketers need to listen as well.
Marketers need to form a relationship or bond with their subscribers on their email list, otherwise, just like with relevancy, they will unsubscribe, mark you as spam, or just delete your email in a heartbeat. Listening to what your subscribers want by comparing open rates to other emails is one way to lay the groundwork for the relationship by looking at the data to send them the emails that they want to open. The next step is to make sure your emails are teaching them something actionable or provide some sort of takeaway. You should always ask yourself “What will my subscriber get out of this email?” And finally, don’t overflow your subscribers with email. There are over 144.8 billion emails sent out a day, while everyone just wants to hit inbox zero. Don’t be the marketer to stand in the way of that.
Acknowledging this relationship with extend your campaign into living happily ever after.
3. Goals
A positive ROI is a great outcome for an email campaign, but is it and should it really be one of your goals? Identifying the goals of a campaign are essential because they answer why you are forming this campaign in the first place.
Vivek Sharma, made it clear when he stated that real-time email, like all marketing should, should start and end with goals. The goals help identify your target audience, outline metrics you’ll want to measure and hone in a timeframe to meet the goals. These goals give you a structure to identify what is working and what isn’t working the in the campaign. Goals innately have a self-accountability mechanism and if something isn’t working in that email campaign you can try to maneuver the subject line, body of the email etc. to make sure you are still inline to meet your goal. Goals help to track and maintain progress especially with email campaigns.
For example a goal of a new campaign could be to increase open rates by 50% and to increase click-throughs by 10%. A positive ROI could result in these goals; however, that is a measurement that always should be ultimately met.
Combining all of these factors together, you could have a highly successful email marketing campaign on your hands. These are all pillars that help ensure subscribers are opening, clicking and maybe converting into customers.
Do you have these elements in your email campaigns? Am I missing any parts to this equation? Be sure to leave us a comment below, we’d love to discuss more. And if you’re on feeling on your email campaign shoot me an email at (sabel@trackmaven.com).
