Email marketing campaigns are a contemporary marketing tactic used to instantly send information to your target market and increase sales. The benefits? You can reach your target audience directly and send them ample information in one go. You can also customize your message to personally communicate with each of your customers; and you can begin a variety of email marketing campaigns and also regularly update your customers and potential customers about upcoming offers and events.
While it is an effective way of reaching potential customers, it can also go wrong if a proper strategy is not implemented when soliciting these emails and if your previous email marketing campaigns are not audited.
Are you reaching your desired audience? Are you getting the results that you were anticipating? Or is your email getting classified as SPAM? Do your customers immediately recognize an email from you? How much are your email marketing campaigns costing you? These questions must be answered readily in order to ensure that your email marketing campaigns are serving their purpose and your marketing team is not wasting its effort, time and money.
Why is this important? According to MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Benchmark Guide, up to 20% of email campaigns are blocked, trashed, or deleted and are not even read by the target audience. This means that these email campaigns are not even reaching their desired destination, let alone serving their purpose.
B2B marketers that send emails to people on their opt-in lists are getting much higher click-through rates than those who send them to random people. Moreover, a study revealed that 80% of the 2,252 people interviewed claimed that they do not bother reading an email before reporting it as SPAM if they do not recognize the sender.
This means that an effective email marketing campaign is highly needed.
Here is how an email audit can help you develop one:
Calculate the cost of your email marketing campaign
You have to measure your costs against your revenue in order to determine profitability. Accordingly, it is also important to calculate the costs of your previous email marketing campaigns. Using a calculator would be easier to get the correct cost estimate. This is the first step in determining their effectiveness and finding areas for improvement.
Did you add graphics, videos, or other such things to your previous email marketing campaigns? What were the costs associated with gathering and presenting information? How much did you have to spend to customize and send these emails to your desired audience?
Once you know how much money you have put into these email campaigns, you can easily measure the revenue generated against them as one way to measure their effectiveness. An audit would allow you to do this and also find ways to reduce the cost and increase the effectiveness of these campaigns.
Help you build better lists
Your previous email marketing campaigns may not have been optimally successful because you were not reaching the right audience. Perhaps, you were sending emails to people who did not want to receive updates regarding your business and hence all of your emails were either being marked as SPAM, were deleted or left unopened.
When you conduct an email audit, you can build better lists by taking following things into account: (a) determine whether all of the members on your previous lists have opted to receive emails from you, (b) analyze whether you have suppressed emails to unsubscribed members, (c) and explore whether your target audience is expecting to receive the kind of material that you are sending. An audit can also help you understand whether the people on your email list are expecting to receive messages as frequently as you send them or not.
Once you have all of this information in place, you can build a better list and prevent your emails from being trashed and/or blocked.
Enable you to properly manage segments
Once you have an appropriate list in place, an audit can help you determine whether you are segmenting your customers appropriately and whether you are being responsive to their particular needs.
For example, when conducting an audit you will be able to see what categories you are using to segment customers. Are you segmenting customers according to demographic information? Are you also paying attention to behavioral information such as how often they purchase items, download information, whether they click on something or not, and what type of content do they view?
This can help you categorize your customer segments and then personally target them accordingly. So, if your customers are responding to your email marketing campaigns, well and good. But, if they are not, you can build new marketing campaigns to remind them to take action, encourage a particular action, or make new offers to suit their liking.
Allow you to create compelling content
Whether you are a small business or a larger entity, you definitely need great content to entice potential customers. An email audit will help you analyze the content of previous email campaigns and help you determine some of the things you need to incorporate to produce a better copy. Accordingly, you can pinpoint what is working for you and what is not.
What’s on the checklist for content? You can check if your copy is appealing for your target audience and has the correct tone. Are you overburdening potential customers with too much information? Is your information dispersed aesthetically in your document or is it worded in an interesting and compelling way? Have you included vital information? Did you give direct links to your website?
One of the most important aspects of your email is the subject line. The subject line needs to be concise and clear, ensuring that a high click-through rate is maintained and readers are compelled to at least read your email. An audit allows you to recognize problematic areas and helps you restructure or reword your content to increase the click-through rate and improve the effectiveness of your email campaign.
Once you properly audit the quality of your content, you are likely to create better email marketing campaigns in the future; ones that will give the audience exactly what is needed, when it is needed, and encourage them to take the required action.
Improve your responsiveness
When you audit your previous email marketing campaigns, you may find problems with responsiveness. Only sending a potential or existing customer an email is not enough as you have to ensure that you are highly responsive when that customer reverts back and has a query or requires assistance. Going through your previous marketing campaigns and shedding some light upon responsiveness may help you improve your future email marketing campaigns.
What should you look for? Do you have an email address that potential or existing customers can reply to and is the required person available to promptly answer their concerns? Have you maintained a calendar for your emails and do you span them out accordingly? Are all of the links in your email functioning appropriately and have you test messaged people in your own team to see whether they are receiving messages in a timely fashion?
Performing an email campaign audit can reveal areas that can be improved and help you develop better campaigns in the future. Unless you know what has gone wrong, you can’t make it right! Therefore, arm your sales team with a sales CRM system, give them perfectly tailored email campaigns, and watch your sales shoot!
