Good email campaigns take time to execute. To help ensure the best return on investment, your planning and strategy is vital. In partnership with email experts Spotler (formally CommuniGator), we bring you our top tips for a successful campaign.
It can be difficult to attribute a direct profit to any individual email, but the attention of your marketing team is a resource that you need to invest wisely. How do you make sure that your email campaigns are generating enough Return On Investment (ROI) to be worthwhile?
Here is a key 5-step process for building campaigns that deliver better results.
- Set your expectations
Every email that you send needs to have a purpose, whether it’s to invite people to an exhibition, to generate leads or to show off your latest new service offering. The very first stage of your plan must make that purpose clear. Without knowing this, it is hard to know what success looks like.
It’s important to make sure your expectations are realistic. Before you start, take the time to understand what success rate you can reasonably expect.
- Value, value, value
If you have a business email address, you’ve probably received an email where the sender ‘just wanted to check-in’. Or the all-too-common ‘Did you see my last email?’
When your email is competing for attention with 126 others (the average for UK inboxes in 2019) the content must benefit the reader. They won’t automatically care about what you want them to care about.
Give your audience value, maybe gain their interest by sharing industry insight or e-guides and get them to buy into your brand before a hard sale. This will help you stand out from your competitors.
- Targeting is key
The value that you offer is different between job roles. It is important to create content that is targeted to the audience that you are talking to.
For example, you wouldn’t send “5 sales emails that close deals” to a Marketing Director. Delivering genuine ROI on an email means only sending it to those who care about the topic.
If you send this type of email to every contact in your database, the vast majority will not open it and the results will be hard to draw real value from. However, targeting Sales Directors is likely to make a very real difference to response rates. A low engagement rate will tell you that your content isn’t striking the right chord and needs to be tweaked.
You need a range of lists to be successful. A geography-based set for seminars, a web-behaviour set for lead nurturing, a list based on contract dates to deliver additional value to your customers at the right time.
- Remove the hard work
Spotler’s “Tuesday Send” lead generation campaign is a staple of their marketing strategy. After sending out their latest blog, engaged contacts are sent follow-up content based on their interests. With 4 tiers of content, managing this manually would be a nightmare.
Instead, take the time to build all the content for the upcoming quarter in advance using a Workflow tool. Once the campaign launches, simply check the results once per week. As an effective lead generator, you can see it is working by the new leads which filter through.
- Tracking every step
The final key step is to assess the results of your campaign. Start by comparing them with the expectations you set at the beginning of the campaign design process.
Met your goal? Excellent! Your process is working well, and you can apply it to your future campaigns.
It can be tempting to not report on campaigns which aren’t matching your expectations. However, to do this is harmful to your cause. The sensible course is to investigate why a campaign didn’t perform.
The power of return on investment
Following this process, and continuing or ending your campaigns accordingly, has benefits which reach beyond a good statistic for your reporting. Strong ROI translates to more customers coming on board, or fewer customers going quiet and leaving.
You will be able to design new campaigns, knowing what results you can achieve. Having a stable base of high-performing campaigns means you can try new ideas, without their success being crucial to keeping your pipeline full.
About this blog
Written in collaboration with Spotler. An all-in-one marketing automation platform which allows you to manage every step of your digital journey. From tracking leads to building complex campaigns. They integrate with most CRM systems, connecting you with your data, streamlining your campaigns.
Marketscan is proud to be a Spotler partner. If you are looking for a new email marketing platform, please let us know and your Account Manager will introduce you.
