Email has proven time and again to be an effective marketing channel to generate revenue. According to the Email Marketing Industry Census from Econsultancy, “Email is still in the running for the top spot when it comes to return on marketing investment.” But is your business getting as much out of your email program as possible?
There are some highly valuable things you can do to maximize the value of your email marketing efforts: Determine your end goals, define your important metrics, and optimize continuously.
Determine Email Marketing Goals
Every email marketer wants to see increased engagement with their campaigns—and to learn what resonates with your subscribers, you need to test, test and test some more. But which aspects of your email campaigns should you spend your time testing?
The end goals of email marketing can be divided into micro and macro conversions. In email marketing, micro conversions are things like opens and clicks, while the macro conversion is usually purchases.
With an end goal of increasing conversions in mind, first you need to increase opens and clicks.
Increasing email open rates
Making a strong impression in an inbox is crucial to engage subscribers. Optimize the following factors in order to garner a higher open rate:
- From name—The sender name should be recognizable and establish familiarity with your company.
- Subject line—Run an A/B test or multivariate test with different subject lines to increase the impact on open rates.
- Send time—Identify which time of day or day of week receives the highest open rate.
- Frequency—Sending too few emails is a mistake, but too many emails may overwhelm your subscribers and lead to lower open rates.
Increasing email click-through rates
In addition to increasing email open rates, you should also be targeting click-through rates. Optimizing these factors will help increase the rates of this micro conversion:
- Call-to-action (CTA)—It’s the most important part of any email, and small changes to placement, size, shape and colors can drastically affect your click-through rate.
- Relevance—Leverage behavioral data to make sure that you’re sending relevant, timely emails to interested subscribers.
- Template format—Test different email formats such as responsive HTML and plain text. It’s important to point out that we’ve occasionally seen higher click-throughs with simpler designs.
Generating more purchases
Ultimately, all the optimization points above will help you generate more purchases.
The most important step to strengthening revenue generated from email is to actively engage your subscribers, and the best way to understand your subscribers is to continually test your email campaigns.
Define Important Metrics
Once you understand your micro and macro conversion goals, you need to identify which metrics best support it. If you have a clear set of metrics to track and an end goal in mind, you should feel comfortable increasing your email marketing spending—which is proven to earn you more revenue.
Here are a few metrics that measure the performance of individual campaigns in relation to your overall email marketing goal.
Conversions—Most email communications have a strong CTA. When users take that action, it is called a conversion. That conversion can be defined as anything from signing up for a free trial to submitting payment information in order to purchase a product. However you define that conversion, it’s measured with the following formula:
Revenue—This metric illustrates how much revenue was generated from a given message, or how email has driven your marketing program collectively. Through different analytics, you can drill down into revenue driven by email send frequency, region or specific time of deployment.
Return on investment—With every email marketing effort, you should define the ROI. This metric shows the value of your campaign by comparing how much money you spent on the campaign with how much revenue you actually got out of it. It’s calculated using the following formula:
Email cost-per-thousand—Typically, you pay for email campaigns at a set price-per-email. This metric shows the cost of every thousand emails you send, and it is calculated as follows:
Optimize Email Marketing Campaigns With Tests
Now let’s take a look at four simple steps for optimizing email campaigns:
Test one variable at a time
To yield the most accurate results, it is a best practice to test just one variable of the email campaign. If you run tests for more than one variable at once, it will be difficult to determine which variable correlates with which result.
Determine your sample size
If you have a large list, then you will be able to send the test to a defined sample size. When you have results from this sample list, you can then send the winning configuration to your remaining subscribers. However, if you have a small list, you may have to send the test to the entire list in order to accumulate enough results.
Equally divide and randomize your sending list
Target equally-sized segments of random subscribers for best results.
Use optimization tools
Make your life easier by using an available testing tool. Most ESP’s offer a built in A/B test or MVT tool to use. Standard feature of these tools are:
- Select your random split
- Select the duration of the test based on subscribers and time
- Monitor results
- Select the winner automatically or manually
Keystone
Campaign optimization isn’t a one-time thing; it’s an ongoing effort that’s integral to the success of your email marketing efforts. You should build optimization points into your everyday running automations and document all of your results for future campaigns. Then you can sit back and watch conversions increase and revenue come through.
Ben Meyer is the Email Campaign Coordinator at cleverbridge
