Email is one of the most effective ways for marketers to send the right message to the right people at the right time. Plus, it delivers the best ROI of any digital marketing activity.
However, if there’s one aspect of your strategy that’s off, it can severely impact the entire performance of your campaign. Before you mark off your campaigns as failures, take a step back and consider what you can do to improve your email marketing strategy.
It all starts with automating your drip campaigns
There are a few basic best practices that most marketers are already following in their email strategies, such as list segmentation and email personalization. Before you do any of that, you need to map out your customer journeys and automate your drip campaigns.
Source: Campaign Monitor
Carefully planned drip campaigns could have multiple different paths your customers could take based on their response (or lack thereof) to emails or other touch points.
This process would be tedious and challenging to do manually, especially with an extensive contact list.
Automating the process helps create a more authentic experience because your pre-planned messages are delivered at the exact moments that your individual contacts need them.
Automated emails receive 71% higher open rates and 152% higher click-through rates than standalone messages.
Your layout also plays a significant role in your email marketing strategy
You’re building your emails using a tool on desktop, but the majority of people are now opening emails on mobile devices. You need to be thinking mobile first when creating your emails or, at least, using a mobile-responsive design.
Take extra care when implementing CSS code into your HTML emails, because the final version of your email might look different depending on the email provider your customers are using.
Remember, a perfect customer journey map means nothing if the emails are visually distracting.
How to measure my email marketing strategy
If you’re already running an email marketing strategy, you’re hopefully paying attention to at least the basic email metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and ROI.
If you want to take your email marketing strategy a step further, you should also monitor your unsubscribe rate and list growth rate.
A high unsubscribe rate could indicate that your content is not resonating with your audience and you might need to adjust your segmentation or customer journey.
Ideally, you want your list to be growing at a faster rate than your unsubscribes. If it’s the other way around, it shows your contact list is shrinking, and your campaign is not healthy.
You can track all of these metrics in the reporting dashboard of your ESP.
Does it really matter?
The number of active email users continues to increase. In fact, there are three times as many email users as there are Facebook and Twitter users combined.
With so many people using email, marketing teams need to do everything they can to improve their email marketing strategies. This is especially true if they want to stand out from the crowd.
At the same time, email isn’t the only way marketers can promote products and make money. Social media is another popular tool but generally doesn’t have the success rate as email. In the end, it’s up to you to decide what works best for your brand and your audience.
What now?
Once you understand a few clever ways to improve your email marketing strategy, you can go back and see what aspects of your campaigns could be updated.
Before you make any permanent changes to your strategy, you need to run tests to determine how your audience will respond to your updates.
While you’re at it, you might want to consider emailing your customers and asking them to add your email to their safe sender list. It could be an easy way to boost certain performance metrics.