Email Marketing Insights
What is email marketing success?
Email marketing is often criticised as an antiquated method of marketing to potential customers. Some of this is true, when brand awareness is discussed without an understanding around the objective of the tool, within an existing marketing strategy.
For example, is the objective to:
- Create a means of introducing a brand to prospects from an event, who have signed up to a competition.
- Deliver monthly email marketing newsletters to existing customers to encourage increased consumption of your product.
- Move a prospect who has signed up for more information on your website, closer to conversion?
Each campaign will have a different measurement for success, which is important to bare in mind. What’s common with all these goals, is that they sit somewhere in the lifecycle of the customer journey and ultimately must end in a conversion to grow your business.
As much as brand awareness and reconnecting with customers is discussed when talking about email, it’s still about future conversions and used correctly, email marketing is still a very effective way to achieve these.
Why do I need to measure email marketing success?
Having navigated the research and strategy stages of marketing, to create an email marketing campaign that will convert more customers, it’s important to track the success of your campaign.
Email marketing can be measured through standalone metrics offered by tools such as Mailchimp:
- Open Rate – The number of audience members that opened your email.
- Click Rate – The number of audience members that clicked-through to your website.
- Unsubscribe Rate – The number of audience members that unsubscribed to your email.
However, it’s important your email campaign measures how these numbers convert in to actual customers. Understanding both the performance of your email marketing campaigns and how they affect website performance will set you up for marketing success!
What benefits will my business see from measuring email marketing success?
Measuring the success of your email marketing campaign will allow you to not only improve campaigns that aren’t performing as you would like but also improve the performance of campaigns which are already proving successful and profitable, accelerating your businesses growth.
Understanding the success of a specific email campaign itself will allow you to replicate your messaging with future email newsletters. It also allows you to replicate the success across to other marketing channels, both more traditional such as marketing flyers and brochures, and online, across your website and social media.
In addition to understanding which elements of your email marketing campaign are proving successful, using the tool itself and top level statistics such as those described above, it’s important that success is measured across the entirety of the marketing campaign.
Much like any social media campaign, UTM codes (a special type of code specific to online marketing campaigns) can be setup through Google to track link clicks from your email marketing campaigns through to your website and conversion.
In addition to measuring the conversion rate of these campaigns, you will be able to measure:
- The actions potential customers are taking on your site in real time, through your email campaign including the pages they’re viewing, the time they’re spending on the site and which page they exit the site from.
- The success of the email marketing campaign in isolation to the rest of your marketing channels. This allows you to measure the performance against your other marketing spends on social media and investment in SEO.
- The success of each marketing campaign against each other and which ones are converting more effectively. A click-through doesn’t always equate to a conversion and you may find the campaigns that convert the most successfully don’t always generate the most traffic. This is especially the case, if you’re looking to use email marketing to meet different objectives with prospects that are at different stages in their decision-making lifecycle.
- The behaviour flow of your audience which will depict the journey users are taking when they arrive from your email marketing campaign. This will allow you to see where your campaign is performing well and where you’re losing potential sales.
There are a vast array of tools both within Google Analytics and email marketing software, which allow you to improve the performance across your campaigns. Not just considering email but the wider marketing objectives you’ve set for your business.
How do I measure email marketing success?
To begin measuring your email campaign success, you’ll need first need to ensure Google Analytics is setup.
It’ll then be important to familiarise yourself with Mailchimp’s measurement metrics to understand how your email marketing campaigns are performing individually and if they’re engaging your audience enough to encourage click-through’s to your website.
To setup a UTM code, so you can measure the performance of individual marketing campaigns on Google Analytics, you can use Google’s URL Builder.
Simply:
- Add your existing Website URL, which your email campaign is going to link through to.
- Under Campaign Source, add the name of your newsletter so you can identify it in your Google Analytics account.
- Add the Campaign Medium as email, so you can track the types of campaigns that are performing well.
- Create a Campaign Name for your campaign.
- You can then use the Generated Campaign URL in your email campaign to track it.
If you need any support in setting up tracking for your email marketing campaigns or reviewing their performance, we’d be happy to provide some support.
In addition, we can provide an email marketing audit free of charge, along with producing recommendations to improve your sales and lead generation. Get in touch here.
What else do I need to know?
Email marketing is still a critical tool to support the rest of your marketing campaign. Where it sometimes comes unstuck is setting objectives or the messaging used within the campaign.
It’s highly measurable too! Using the methods outlined above you can begin identifying straight away, which parts of your campaigns work and where they need improvement. If an email campaign is attracting a high volume of traffic to your site through click-throughs, that aren’t resulting in conversions, does your website content need improvement?
At Need to Know Marketing we love providing information for SME’s so they can grow. We also understand this work can be time consuming and difficult to begin with. To assist you, we provide a free of charge one hour consultation, where we have an open discussion about your business objectives and what you’re looking to achieve.
Following the consultation we will provide you with a marketing strategy, advising how we recommend meeting your business objectives through marketing. If you are interested in knowing the cost of our services, you can use our calculator as a guide.
“Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.”
Walt Disney knew telling a story is always always easier with pictures. It crosses all barriers. The best story tellers are always the best at engaging their audience.