Email Marketing has become a widely used marketing objective due to its effectiveness and relatively low cost, but many companies aren’t getting the most out of their email campaigns. The reporting and statistics available with email marketing can provide crucial data to not only improve future email campaigns, but also to serve as a foundation for developing a comprehensive online identity. This whitepaper will discuss the importance of analyzing the data from email marketing campaigns and incorporating best practices from those campaigns in other aspects of online advertising.
Discover the Data
Any email marketing program will supply basic data about a campaign’s performance. Deliverability rates, opens, and click-throughs are nothing new to the seasoned marketer, but many marketers fail to perform a thorough analysis to properly understand all of the numbers. Without an in-depth look at the reporting for email campaigns, the valuable information email marketing provides isn’t harnessed for all that it’s worth.
In addition to the basic statistics provided by their email marketing software, marketers need to break out the Excel charts and create multiple formulas to track all the data from every campaign over an extended period of time to get a better look at how your email marketing campaigns are performing. With some simple formulas you can not only know an individual email open rate, but how that open rate compares to your average email open rate. By calculating and tracking the average deliverability, open, and click-through rates for email campaigns you can have a better understanding of which emails deviate from the norm—whether they perform better or worse than your average email.
Not Your Average Email
Once you’ve calculated the average statistics over time and pinpointed emails that standout in deliverability, opens, and clicks, it’s time to closely inspect those outliers. What is it about those emails that made them perform well (or not so well)? Go back and inspect the subject lines of better performing emails. Are there trends in the keywords, phrasing, or length of the subject lines? Close inspection of these trends will tell you what is leading to a higher or lower open rate. Next, check out the individual clicks in outlier emails. Did more people click on images or text? What images or text worked better? Did people react better to an email blast with strong call-to-actions, or a newsletter with informative editorial? Keep track of these trends in the keywords, images, and text that make
those outliers stand out to incorporate these best practices in future campaigns. It may seem like common sense (and it is), but not enough marketers take time to properly scrutinize their email campaigns.
Beyond the Inbox
Once you’ve compiled a dataset of the best and worst keywords and images from your email marketing campaigns, adopt those practices into other areas of your online identity. The data is there—why not use it?
Social Networking
Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook are quickly gaining popularity as marketing tools, but just what should you “tweet” about? Email marketing reports can supply you with an arsenal of content to spread throughout your social media channels. In addition to replicating your email blasts and newsletters in your Tweets and newsfeed, take your email reports into account to specially craft your messages to include the keywords that perform best in email campaigns. If a certain phrase in a subject line gave you a higher open rate, Tweet about that phrase! Including the right buzzwords in your social media messages can gain not only more followers, but form a stronger relationship with the followers you already have.
Search Engine Optimization & Search Engine Marketing
Just as those buzzwords from our email campaigns can help you gain more followers in social networking sites, they can also help increase your website traffic through search engines. Whether using organic search engine optimization or paid search engine marketing, picking the right keywords to include in your website copy and advertisement banners is crucial to drive the right traffic. Knowing which keywords received the most clicks in your email will tell you which words will be best relatable to your company and service offerings for a web search.
Blogging, Podcasts, Video Blogs & Press Releases
If a certain topic of your business is receiving high-traffic results in your email campaigns, give the people what they want! Create an expanded explanation of a particularly popular phrase in a corporate blog, podcast or video blog. This ongoing dialogue will help strengthen the relationship with your current customer
base and can help draw in some prospects as well. A properly run blog can also increase search engine optimization to help boost organic searches, too. In addition to using a blog, crafting press releases and distributing them to industry publications and websites can dramatically increase your overall exposure. The more popular the topic (hint: the ones that receive the most clicks in your emails!), the more likely your press release or article will be published.
A Unified Identity
By constantly evaluating the reporting from your email campaigns you can develop a unified online identity across every virtual channel. But this analysis isn’t a one-way street—by utilizing multiple forms of online marketing and scrutinizing the reporting from each, you can have the data and knowledge necessary to strengthen every other channel. What works best in an email campaign can help your social networking and what performs well in search engine marketing can boost an email campaign. Developing a powerful online identity requires an in-depth and cyclical approach to increase the effectiveness of each distinct online medium.
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