Email marketing is very cyclical by nature – it’s never ‘finished’, and that is the beauty of it. The cycle includes: testing, sending, analysing, changing and repeating. This process allows you to improve your results and ROI each and every time you send.

Here are a few of the cost-effective tools available to help you achieve your goals:

Testing – One of the most powerful aspects of email is how quickly you can get results from your testing. By testing elements of a mailing before you send, you can make changes based on the results prior to mailing to your entire list. Things to test include: subject line, sender from, day, time, call to action, article length, layout, clicks and conversions.

Metrics – A valuable element of email is its measurability. With analytics you can measure activities and behaviour of groups and individuals per mailing, as well as over a period of time. The metrics that can be measured include: delivery rates, response and click rates, identified opens, new subscribers and sales. Tracking this information will allow you to build a profile of your customers and prospects.

Benchmarking – If you are new to email marketing and don’t have benchmarks, then it’s fine to start by measuring your results against general benchmarks. But you should then strive to create your own benchmarks to measure your own performance over time. Don’t measure just one mailing. Measure one mailing against many. Build up an overview of performance in general by doing trend analysis. Measure your key drivers of success, and seek to learn which links, promotions, offers, articles, etc are working (or not working) over time. Also check your list growth (and erosion) over time and measure your subscriber activity based on how active they are vs. how long they’ve been on the list.

Segmenting – Before repeating the cycle, your aim should be to use what you’ve learned from analysing to make changes. Segmenting out your lists based on this information will allow you to send more targeted (received by the right person), timely (coming at the right time) and relevant (containing the right information) emails to all of your subscribers. What can you segment by?  It can be as simple as separating customers from prospects, geographic region, type of business, size of business, who the email is from (e.g. Account Manager). It can be as sophisticated as dynamically generated content that reflects an individual reader’s interests, previous clicks and purchases.

Denise Cox, Newsletter Specialist,
Newsweaver