My E-mail Marketing Campaign Sucks…What to Do?
Do you find it difficult to rise above the noise and the clutter with email marketing?
For most of the email marketing campaigns, the answer is going to be – YES!
Admit it.
We all have faced this question in our life. And why this happens?
The answer lies in this wonderful quote:
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein
Yes.
How can we expect different results if we will keep running each email marketing campaign in the same manner?
After all, it’s not about what we do but also about how we do it!
So, what next?
Have patience!
Rather than giving you direct answers (and some more marketing gyaan), I will prefer to ask you some more relevant questions.
The trick is – answer these questions and I am sure you will find your soul-searching answers:
Do You Provide an Omni-channel Enabled-campaign?
Omni-channel enablement means your e-mail marketing campaign is available on multiple channels and touchpoints (website, paid advertising platforms, email marketing, blogging, social media platforms, etc.).
Leverage every ounce of your digital presence to enable your audience to access your campaign. More the merrier.
Are your Creating Custom E-mail Marketing Campaigns for Your Prospects?
If you’re delivering the same message for all your prospects, then you are making the biggest mistake.
Each of your customer/prospects is at different stages of buying.
Someone is just researching, someone is evaluating and some of them are at the decision-making stage.
If your e-mail marketing campaign is selling stuff to people who are at the first stage of learning about your services, it won’t work.
They are looking for insights, informative stuff.
Hence, they will not understand your message and won’t take the desired step.
If you are educating or selling to a potential customer who is looking to evaluate your services, it won’t work.
The same applies to people who are at the stage of making a buying decision and you are giving them educational stuff rather than content that helps them make an informed decision.
So, understand this: You must have tailored e-mail marketing campaigns for different customers.
I know your next question: how to know which customers is at what stage?
That’s where lead nurturing comes into the picture.
How good you are at Lead Capturing
Lead capturing is a science that needs to be perfected to get the desired impact.
At times, campaigns can get a good number of open rates and click rates but they don’t get captured as hot leads.
One of the main reason for this could be your poor ‘Contact Form’ or ‘Enquiry Form’.
It’s your below-average quality of lead form that discourages your website visitors to fill in the forms.
The simple goal is to make your form more interactive, more personalized – asking the right questions in the right flow. That’s all.
Are you able to nurture your leads or not?
If you are not, then you’re assuming that everyone who shares their email IDs is ready to buy from you.
And if that’s true, then you can’t be more wrong.
First, let me help you understand lead nurturing in little more detail:
Lead nurturing is the process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel, and through every step of the buyer’s journey. It focuses marketing and communication efforts on listening to the needs of prospects, and providing the information and answers they need.
Marketo
In simple words, lead nurturing helps you send the perfect series of messages to engage, convert, and retain customers.
You can drive people towards a common goal by sending each person the perfect series of email, in-app, and push messages based on their unique behavior.
You can improve the conversion rate with an automated lead nurturing tools listed below:
1. Intercom
2. Leadsquared
3. BatchBlue
4. ACT!
5. InfusionSoft
6. SwiftPage
7. Enthusem
8. AWeber
10. SendPepper
What is your Goal Bench-marking?
I am sure you must have set some e-mail marketing campaign objectives before you launched it. If you haven’t, do it now.
For most marketers, the typically the main objective is – increasing revenue.
However, this may not apply to all of your e-mail marketing campaigns. It depends on the content and messaging of an email marketing campaign.
You can set a variety of goals that are more specific like open rate, click rate, form conversion rate, campaign traffic from different sources, page session duration, user flow, etc.
Again, you should be smart enough to define different goals for different email marketing campaigns.
Keep realistic goals.
Test your campaign goals against the industry average.
Look for the patterns in the email marketing campaign performance.
Keep your goals time-bound like achieve a 4% open rate in the first 2 months or increase click rate by 4% in the first quarter.
Here is a quick checklist for campaign performance optimization:
- Open Rate
- Delivery Rate
- Click-through Rate
- % of Subscribed Contacts
- % of Unsubscribed Contacts
- % of Hard Bounces
- % of Soft Bounces
- % of Conversion Rate
- Average time on landing page
- Cost per lead
- Cost per Open/Click Rate
- Clicks to Conversion rate
- Campaign Reach
- Campaign/post share rate
Are You Tracking the Right Things?
Don’t forget that anything that gets measured, gets improved.
Many marketers do everything right except the tracking.
Many tracks but they fail to track what really matters.
Some of them track well but don’t measure it properly. They fail to read the hidden patterns in past email marketing campaigns.
And remember, effective email marketing campaign tracking means better ROI and higher profits.
Summing Up
As promised in the beginning of this article, hope you have answered objectively to each of the questions asked by me.
Poor email marketing campaign performance happens to the best of us.
It’s even happened to me.
I know that repeatedly getting poor email marketing campaign results is scary.
However, if this happens, don’t panic.
It’s high time that you bounce back with these tips to deliver an impressive email marketing campaign.
By optimizing your email marketing campaign(s) with the given recommendations, you can certainly get better results
You just need to try these strategies.
Trust me when I say that they’re tried-and-true methods that have worked for many of my clients.
I am sure there might be few more common slip-ups than the discussed here.
Maybe, I’ll revisit them in a future article.
Are you now ready to implement these strategies and optimize your email marketing campaigns?
Share your experience after leveraging these ideas and how did it improve your email marketing campaign performance?
As an experienced digital marketing consultant, I help our customers optimize their B2B and B2C lead generation marketing through engaging digital campaigns (Web, Social, e-mailers, Mobile, PPC).
What are your thoughts on email marketing campaign optimization strategies shared in this article?
Let me know in the comments section below or tweet me @iamnitinmalik
