What is Email Marketing?
In a broader sense, email marketing is the use of emails by a business entity to promote its products or services. Email marketing is usually resorted to by a company when it needs to attract new customers, introduce a new product or announce a new development in the company that will benefit its existing and target customers.
You can also conduct an email marketing campaign to foster customer loyalty. This is where you can encourage your existing customers to re-order your product, especially if your product has undergone some upgrades or improvements. Hundreds of emails are also sent occasionally by companies to encourage their customers to take advantage of a product offering that comes with special discounts but under a time limit.
Businesses find email marketing very beneficial because it is affordable, it can be done on a massive scale and its effectiveness can be quantitatively measured. Compared to conventional advertising campaigns which are labor-intensive, time-consuming and expensive, email marketing can effectively fulfill the same purpose faster, smarter and cheaper.
There are some drawbacks though to email marketing. One of them is this thing called spam mail. If you send hundreds of emails at any one time, your target customers will be easily inundated with unsolicited mail in their inboxes. Your customers might resent your unsolicited emails. This is the primary reason why some businesses shy away from using email in their campaigns.
How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Email Marketing Campaign
In order to determine if your email marketing campaign is achieving its purpose or not, you must check its KPIs or key performance indicators. There are several areas in your promotional campaign that can tell you if you are succeeding in your sales goals or not.
Click-through rate or CTR
One of the indicators that you need to be concerned about is the click-through rate or CTR. It is the percentage of people on your email list who actually clicked on the link that you have provided in your email. Remember that your primary goal in sending those emails is for your recipients to click on the link inside your letter. Therefore, if a large percentage of the recipients clicked on the link, that means your email campaign is successful.
Open rate
Another key indicator of your success is its open rate. This is the percentage of people in your email list who actually opened and read your email message. If 85 percent of your recipients opened and read your message, your marketing campaign is successful to a certain extent.
Delivery rate
The delivery rate of your email is also an important indicator of your success. You can compute your campaign’s delivery rate if you will divide the total number of messages that you sent minus the total number of emails that bounced or were not delivered and then divide the result by the total number of emails that you sent.
Bounce rate
This leads us to the bounce rate of your emails. You guessed it right. It is the percentage of the total number of emails sent which were not really delivered to the inboxes of the intended recipients. There are many reasons why your email is not delivered. Some of the reasons are a non-existent email address, the inboxes of the recipients are already full, the server which reserves your emails is already overloaded or your email was blocked, and so forth.
Conversion rate
The most important metric of email marketing campaigns is the conversion rate. Why? Simply because it is the true indicator of the success of your marketing and promotion. This rate represents the percentage of your recipients who actually did what you want them to do. You were able to convince them to buy your product, sign a contract, renew their subscriptions, and so forth.
How to Increase the Payoff of a Campaign
There are several proven ways by which you can increase the payoff of your email marketing campaign. Here are some of them.
- Check the veracity of the email addresses that you will use. There are free email verification tools that you can use for this purpose. This will increase your delivery rate, your sender reputation as well as your analytics data.
- Strive to provide your recipients with fresh, relevant, original and exclusive information. This will make your customers believe that you are really concerned about their welfare and that your product will fulfill their needs.
- Be careful in choosing and coding your template. Design your email in such a way that it will look splendid across all platforms, screens, and devices. Make your templates as flexible as possible.
It is very important for you to know if your email marketing campaigns are getting the desired results or not. Remember, your company’s future may depend on it. Thankfully, there is no more guesswork when it comes to measuring its success. If you will follow the above tips, you will definitely ascertain if your campaign is giving you the results that you want.
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by Nelly Muradkhanyan
