#1: Take Advantage of ROI Reporting on Email Campaigns
The first thing to do to make sure that you are getting the most out of your email marketing program is to take a look at the data and reports available to you. One of the key benefits of email marketing in comparison to some other more traditional marketing methods is that there is detailed reporting available and calculating an ROI on marketing efforts has never been easier! Think back to that Direct Mail campaign you ran a few years back, do you know how effective it was? What about that local radio ad you ran? Now that you’re thinking about it, determining a return on investment is not that easy is it? According to a Delivra study run last year, “Email’s ROI was 28.5% vs. 7% for direct mail” (https://www.delivra.com/email-marketing-stats/).
Let’s take an example of this to better understand. Each month you send out 4 different email campaigns, a unique offer for each week of the month. What if you could check a report to see the amount of sales generated based off of that campaign? Helpful right? Maybe one of the offers you are using always brings in less sales than the other campaigns, with detailed reporting that outlier can be identified and corrected for optimal success with email marketing!
#2 Always Include Social Media Links in Email Campaigns
Do you have a rapidly growing customer email database, but your presence on social media is not where you want it to be? A simple solution here would be to include social media links towards the bottom of the email. This is a great way to drive traffic to those pages and improve your overall online presence. Maybe a reason you don’t have as many followers on Facebook is because they simply did not know you had an active profile on the site. Maybe one of your customers hates receiving email, but is constantly on Facebook, this could be a new channel to interact with customers and including social media links in emails opens up this opportunity.
A perfect example of this is maybe you are sending out an email blast to customers with a special offer for the big game. In conjunction with this you are running a campaign on social media for customers to post gameday pictures. A great way to drive traffic to this campaign would be to include a social media link pointing customers to your pages. It should not be a discussion of social media vs. email marketing, they should work together to improve your overall brand recognition and online presence.
#3 Tailor your emails to provide a Personalized Experience
How many times have you received a promotional email from a company and then immediately deleted it because it did not appeal to you? If you are similar to me, then the answer to that question is probably all the time. There is nothing worse than receiving an email from a company and being able to tell that this went out to every customer in their system. “74% of online consumers get frustrated with websites when content (e.g. offers, ads, and promotions) appear to have nothing to do with their interest” (Campaign Monitor).
To put things in perspective, what if you have a customer that comes to your restaurant every day and orders a salad for lunch. How excited do you think they will be to receive an offer to receive a BOGO large pizza deal for dinner? Do you think they will even look over the email? My guess is they will take a look at the subject line and delete the email. Customers want to feel “heard”, they have come to expect tailored offers personalized just for them. They have already started receiving these personalized offers from other companies, restaurants, and businesses, make sure you don’t fall behind!
#4 Ensure that Emails are Optimized for Mobile
It’s 2018, where you can use your smartphone to order a pizza, check in for a flight, transfer money, and you guessed it, check emails! Think about your own personal life, when you are not at work, where are you primarily checking emails? Most likely the answer is on your smartphone or other mobile devices. Consider the last time you received an email that didn’t look good on your phone, did you attempt to read it or just exit out?
“More than half (56%) of your users open your emails on their mobile devices, and up to 80% will delete an email that does not display correctly on their mobile device” (Chamaileon). Why would you want to take a risk like that? If you continue to send out campaigns that do not format well chances are they are going to unsubscribe from your email list. The big players in the Industry are already well ahead of the game on this, make sure that you are sending out responsive emails in order to stay relevant!
#5: Check Email Metrics after each Campaign send-out
Every time that you send out an email, you should be checking the metrics immediately after the send to check on the amount of bounced emails, it is a great way to check if your contact database needs to be updated. After the campaign has been active for a couple days it is good to go in and check the metrics. Look at some of the patterns. Maybe most of your customers are opening emails between 3pm and 5pm.
Now, think about that email blast you sent out last week. Whether you sent it through your point of sale system or another 3rd party email provider, there should be extensive reporting available. You will want to look at the opens, the clicks, the bounces, the unsubscribes. If the data is available to you, it is absolutely something that you should be taking advantage of. If a lot of customers unsubscribe after you send emails, maybe you are sending too often? If there are a lot of bounced emails, maybe it is time to update your contact list? The data is there to help you, not make email marketing more difficult!