How to Make the Most of Email Marketing for Your Company

Use these tips to determine the most appropriate goals for starting an email marketing campaign, and find the right tools to achieve them in benefit of your company.

The pandemic outbreak in the world has encouraged us to start embracing digital technology, which also includes a variety of email marketing tools. Surveys show that 69% of small company owners handle all of their company's marketing responsibilities. The concept of email marketing is fast becoming a necessity to keep up with the competition.

With ROI being the main goal for these SME owners, it is very important to make the most of their email marketing. To do so, businesses must start by setting clear goals, then use the necessary tools to measure success and then streamline the email marketing process.

SMART Methods

For business people, whether they are experienced or new, must know the SMART method and understand the meaning of the acronym to measure the goals of email campaigns correctly. First of all ask yourself the following two questions;

1. Do you have SMART goals?
2. Are you effectively measuring your progress?

While we can track things like impressions, can that increase public awareness of your product or service, via email marketing campaigns?

Email marketing campaigns should be geared towards specific and measurable results, increasing conversion rates and growing the user base. Failure to properly define and track email campaign objectives can lead to missed opportunities and uninformed decision making.

Measurement should be determined by the goals of the marketing email campaign. For example, if our goal is to increase the amount of time visitors spend on a website, we should measure overall time on site (TOS) while monitoring the bounce rate. If our goal is lead generation, we should track the eligibility of the lead source over time, leads by campaign type, and the average number of touchpoints to conversions.

In order to have a successful email marketing campaign, marketers must first define clear goals and metrics to track them.

The Must-track Metrics

While every email campaign will require a team to track certain goal-specific metrics, there are important metrics that are mandatory to track in almost every marketing campaign.

1. Click-through rate (CTR)

This is the percentage of recipients who clicked on one or more links in your email. Many email marketers obsess over email open rates, but open rates can be a misleading statistic.

CTR provides a much better understanding of how interesting our content is to recipients.

2. Conversion Rate

Email campaign conversion rates take analysis one step further, showing how many recipients clicked on an email link and completed the desired action (trying products, surveys, filling out forms).

Conversion rate is one of the most important metrics to track because it relates directly to campaign objectives. Whether you want recipients to sign up for a mailing list or watch product videos, conversion rates effectively measure the persuasive aspect of our email marketing content.

3. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of emails that are not successfully delivered to the inbox. Marketing teams must track “soft” and “hard” bounces. Soft bounces are emails that can't be sent because the recipient's inbox is full or because of other temporary delivery issues. A hard bounce is an email that cannot be sent because the recipient's email address does not exist on the server.

So, if a company email account has a lot of hard bounces, it can be labeled as a spam account by the service provider and all your emails can then end up in the spam folder.

4. Return on investment (ROI)

ROI represents how much revenue an email marketing campaign generates after costs. For example, if an email marketing campaign costs $100 to implement and generates $2,000 in additional company sales, then we made $1,900 and the ROI is 1,900%. It is important to calculate any costs associated with an email marketing campaign for its duration.

While not every email marketing campaign will generate 1,900% ROI, a team that consistently tracks this and other metrics to track will be able to identify a need and continually make improvements to campaigns based on data.

Simplifying Email Marketing Metrics

Marketing teams that can perfect aspects of the collection and analysis of email marketing metrics will avoid valuable data slipping through the cracks or time wasted on failed campaigns.

One way to organize email marketing metrics and streamline analysis is to integrate email marketing tools with CRM software, allowing teams to easily access contact information, leave notes, or update user history in real time. And most importantly, build a targeted email list.

By integrating email marketing with CRM, teams can optimize end-to-end email marketing campaigns, from building audiences to gathering and analyzing key metrics. This eliminates the need to transfer data from one solution to another — which increases the chances of data being lost or abandoned — and creates a centralized view of the entire email marketing campaign.

Given the challenges, optimizing email marketing campaigns can help small companies save money while gaining a competitive advantage. We need to understand how to measure the success of these goals, and simplify the analysis of key metrics to allow for continuous improvement in our email marketing efforts, while still having a positive impact on our company's bottom line.