Email Marketing : what is email effectiveness
Email marketing is one of the most powerful and effective forms of marketing used today. It is quick to deploy, offers immediate highly measurable results, enables advanced segmentation and personalization and delivers a high return on investment.
But to achieve the maximum results from your email marketing program requires experience, expertise and advanced technology.
Exercise more often, read more books, spend more time with significant others and improve email marketing performance. Sound familiar?
With the year coming to an end, now is the perfect time to look back at your email marketing efforts and see what worked, what didn't work and what steps are necessary to take your program to the next level.
Your look back should include:
_ Analysis of key performance metrics
_ Review of recipient feedback, surveys, Web site analytics _ Comparison against internal and relevant external benchmarks _ Review of creative/content
After completing your review or internal audit, now it is time to map at your improvement plan for the coming year. Elements of your plan should include:
_ List building and maintenance
_ Creative
_ Segmentation and personalization
_ Testing
_ Reporting and analysis
In this article we'll focus on what to collect and analyze in your year-end review - and provide some links to past articles and tools to help take your program up a notch in the coming year.
Your first step in the annual review process is to pull together in a spreadsheet the campaign or newsletter results for the year (or shorter period if you distributed an overwhelming number of messages). Include all relevant statistics from opens, clicks, referrals, bounces, unsubscribes, spam complaints, etc. Once assembled, calculate your overall averages and determine the best and worst performing message for each metric.
What metrics should you analyze? The basics such as open, click-through, bounce rates cross all types of email programs. But beyond the standard metrics, ecommerce, publishers and corporate newsletter publishers should look at measures more relevant to their goals and objectives.