Establishing and executing an effective email marketing campaign is about more than consistently being in touch with contacts from your mailing lists. Without routinely gauging the results of your campaigns, you’ll end up spinning your tires and wasting copious amounts of time, energy and money. In other words, consistent analytics are crucial to the long-term success of any email marketing strategy.
Even if you already check analytics on a consistent basis, you could very well be focusing on the wrong metrics–or omitting ones that could propel your campaign from being just so-so to simply spectacular. With these points in mind, familiarize yourself with some of the most important metrics that might be missing from your email marketing strategy. If any of them sound familiar, take steps to remedy the situation and to ensure that your campaigns deliver the best ROI possible.
Lifecycle Metrics
All too often, email marketing campaigns start out with a bang and then slowly but inevitably fizzle out until virtually no one on the list is paying attention anymore. Just because a campaign produces exciting results in the early stages doesn’t mean it will continue to do so for extended periods of time. For this to happen, careful attention must be paid to metrics that reflect user engagement. This means consistently and regularly checking metrics for things like opens, clicks and conversions on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
By considering user engagement across various periods of time, you will get a better sense for how well your campaigns are designed to deliver results over the long haul. This also gives you an opportunity to see when and where users appear to lose interest, so you can take steps to remedy the situation.
While you’re at it, track metrics for first-, second- and third-time buyers as a percentage of total purchases versus established benchmarks. This will demonstrate whether people are coming back for more or abandoning your emails and brand after certain periods of time.
Quality Metrics
Your email marketing strategy will go nowhere without a high-quality mailing list. Therefore, you must routinely analyze metrics relating to your list if you want consistent, effective results. Most notably, are the addresses on your list even active? How often are they checked?
If they’re not used very often, they’re essentially useless to you. On a regular basis, check the overall quality of your list. As new addresses are added, assess their quality by considering their source. Make a point of checking the percentage of addresses that serve as “primary” addresses too as well as the percentage of addresses that are strong buyers of your particular product or service.
Mailbox Type
Finally, perform a regular analysis of how email addresses that are linked to different mailbox types or domains appear to fare in your marketing efforts. This can help you understand your target demographic better and give you a strong idea of which direction to go in moving forward. Even if most of your addresses aren’t very high in quality, it could be that certain mailbox types or domains perform well.
If you’re not already strict about assessing the quality of your email marketing strategy, it’s time to get on board. Prioritize the aforementioned metrics to make your analyses all the more effective.
Tags: marketing tips
