4 Steps to Better E-mail Marketing Results

The interactive revolution has brought many incredible advances, not least is the ability to track e-mail respondents. The results are right there, within days after your campaign has been deployed. These real-time reports allow you to accurately measure the effectiveness of every campaign you send. You can:

• Find out how many recipients opened your e-mail, clicked a link, unsubscribed, forwarded your e-mail to a friend, and more. Find out exactly who is checking out your e-mail, how many times they’re doing it, and when they did it. Get an overview for the life of the campaign or drill down all the way to minute-by-minute detail.
• See what your subscribers are interested in. Not only can you see the total number of clicks for every link in your e-mail, but you can also find out who clicked that link, when they clicked it and how many times. By including a forward to a friend link in your campaign, you can easily see which subscribers are forwarding your e-mail and how many people they’re forwarding to.
• Compare multiple campaigns. Statistics like open and click rates are useful for each campaign, but it’s when you start comparing results over time that the data really shines. By easily comparing stats like opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes and even spam complaints, you can quickly see what content your subscribers find relevant, and just as importantly, what they don’t.

In short, there’s information galore information that has never been available until now, when a single click can provide insight into the habits, interest and intent of an e-mail recipient.

While all this added insight is interesting, the important part is how you can best make use of that information, to turn marketing knowledge into potential sales. Increased sales results will start when you include these four key steps in your next e-mail effort:

• Step #1: Track
• Step #2: Segment
• Step #3: Analyze
• Step #4: Re-market

1. Tracking: It’s truly amazing what you can learn by looking at trends. You get an idea of exactly what is and what isn’t working in the e-mails you send. Tracking opens and clicks alone can tell you who is interested in your product or service, and specifically what articles are most compelling.

1. Segment: If the original databases used to deploy your e-mail were provided in a well-segmented fashion, subsequent e-mail results are considerably easier to discern. You still see all the stats relative to opens, clicks, and so on, but those same results are automatically isolated into specific data segments. If this information is the type of information that will assist you in your sales and marketing efforts, ensure you initially provide data in a usable format.

1. Analyze: You may have heard the term “analysis/paralysis.” Even though e-mail marketing is blindingly fast, this term can still apply. So beware of too much analysis. Just figure out what you need or want to know before the e-mail is deployed and focus just on that. Prepare a simple analysis based on your anticipated needs and then see what the results tell you. Finally, the results don’t lie make plans and changes accordingly!

1. Re-market: Beyond dissemination of the results, the next important step is to continue to market but now you get to market based on a much deeper understanding of your subscriber’s needs or wants.

Re-marketing can include any number of follow-up tactics: if the volume is huge, send another e-mail customized to a specific interest as demonstrated by click-through results; if the volume is more manageable, get the sales force following up those same respondents one-on-one. You get the picture the tactics are endless.

Using e-mail marketing knowledge is more powerful than ever. Put that knowledge to work and laser focus your re-marketing efforts to generate sales.