Improve your email campaign: 10 steps to follow
How can you optimise your email campaign to win over your prospects? The tried and tested practices in email marketing are revealing: you need to analyse consumer behaviour in order to get to know them better. To win them over and build up their loyalty, you need to be sure that you are providing them with a certain amount of added value. But how can you be sure? Here are 10 indicators to keep an eye on that will determine the quality of your email marketing. Some of these are recommended by a well-known email marketing software. Ready to boost your customer acquisition? Sharpen up your e-marketing expertise!
Basic performance indicators
Every customer acquisition strategy involves direct marketing. Whether it's an SMS campaign or an email campaign, you know that you need to measure performance using relevant indicators. Here are the main barometers you need to check when drawing up your reports.
1. Open rate
How many emails have been opened? You can, for example, calculate the open rate for your campaign based on 100 or 1,000 emails sent. If your rate is very low, it is advisable to review two elements: the personalisation and the subject of your email. Work on the impact of your subject line: it needs to be concise, stand out and make people want to open the email! Source: SNCD (Syndicat National de la Communication Directe)
2. The deliverability rate
How many emails actually reach their destination, their inbox? Monitoring the deliverability rate of your email campaign is the first important point: it tells you whether your contact list is up to date. The main aim is to minimise your NPAI (does not live at the address indicated). Expressed as a percentage, the deliverability rate of your campaign also reveals the quality of your database. You need to update it regularly and give preference to opt-in email databases (the recipient has given their prior permission to receive your mailings). Beware of renting "adulterated" files), because legislation and ISP (Internet Service Provider) anti-spam rules are intransigent: It's all about building trust and avoiding spam at all costs!
3. Click-through rate
How many recipients or subscribers clicked on your links in your messages? How many landed on your landing page or visited your website? The click-through rate of your campaign tells you how much interest your audience has shown: depending on the rate, you can see which type of content has provoked more reads. Content is at the heart of the triggering process in the buying decision phase to transform your prospects into customers: it's important to take care with both content and form! Marketers who use inbound marketing techniques recommend this. It will help you to qualify your emailing file so that you can segment it and propose appropriate offers. Source: SNCD (Syndicat National de la Communication Directe)
4. Conversion rate
How many prospects registered on your site, subscribed (or other segments of your mailing list), subscribed to your service, your offer, or bought one of your products, following the sending of your email campaign? The conversion rate is a key indicator for assessing the profitability of any digital marketing action, in order to calculate its ROI (return on investment). It is also an indicator for assessing the business potential of your email file.
5. Unsubscription rate
How many people have unsubscribed from your mailing list? The unsubscribe rate reveals whether your campaign and its informative or promotional content are considered relevant and interesting by your recipients. The higher the rate, the worse the sign: you need to ask yourself some questions and reconsider your approach, at the risk of seeing your email base shrink. Unsubscribing is not trivial... The secret to attracting attention (and keeping it) is to put yourself in your target's shoes. What are their problems? What answers can I give them?
Advanced, more refined statistics
For professional email marketing, simple newsletter software is not enough. In order to build a relationship of trust and communicate more effectively, you need a solution that gives you the ability to measure with precision and finesse. Your customer relationship is at stake. Whether your web communications are business-to-business or business-to-consumer, you need to be responsive and have the statistics to enable you to adjust your marketing strategy.
6. What is the reading time?
How long did your recipient spend reading your email? The actual read time is revealing: by comparing it with your open rate, you can draw some surprising conclusions. You may have a high open rate, but a low read time. If this is the case, then your content (or your offer) needs to be reviewed because your target audience has not shown the expected interest. Aware of these issues, Sarbacanne Software offers you exclusive access to this measurement, through its Sarbacane emailing platform, and shows you how viral it is on social networks.
7. Desktop, mobile? On which devices was your email viewed?
PC, Mac, Apple Smartphone, Android or tablet: the diversity of devices means that you need to comply with the standards for the responsive design of your email, so that your email campaign is displayed correctly on all devices. With Sarbacane emailing software, you can go even further: you can determine precisely whether your readers read your email on their mobile or their computer. This gives you very useful information for adapting the length of your content and optimising the loading time accordingly!
8. What messaging do you use?
Sarbacane stresses the importance of knowing which messaging services your readers use. While the best-known messaging systems are Outlook and Gmail, not all of them offer the same display performance. You need to take into account the constraints imposed by the email systems used by your readers in order to optimise your email as a whole: images, text, links, etc. everything needs to be legible! In this way, you can prepare a customer file by the type of email service used, so that you can send a specific emailing to meet the constraints of that email service... and optimise your prospecting!
9. Tracking links and content clicked
What content and links have been clicked? Who clicked on them? Sarbacane emailing software analyses all of these aspects of your emailing more closely than the basic click-through rate. Links, text, buttons and visuals: everything is scrutinised to reveal in detail the elements that have provoked the most clicks. Cumulative or unique clicks per link and the number of people are valuable statistics for optimising your email marketing campaign: A/B testing, positioning links in your email, checking the actual traffic generated on your website, etc.
10. Where are my readers?
This may seem like a meaningless question, but Sarbacane proves us wrong. The global geotracking capability of the emailing solution allows you to geolocate your readers. The advantage of this is that you can target your different email campaigns according to geographical data: local, or even foreign, particularities need to be taken into account in order to convince your future customers! For those who use Google Analytics, Sarbacane has integrated tracking into its emailing software.
Conclusion
Whatever your sector of activity, you need to enrich your analysis in order to sharpen up your web marketing. Basic performance indicators combined with advanced statistics give you a better understanding of your target audience and its different segments. By aiming for continuous improvement, you can generate a high-performance email campaign and acquire new customers. To trigger an increase in your sales, analyse your leads, listen to what the indicators are telling you, and choose the right email marketing software!
Article translated from French