To measure the success of their email marketing campaigns, many sales reps are satisfied with indicators such as the number of emails opened or the number of clicks made. It’s true that these figures need to be taken into account, but it’s essential that others are too. There are several other indicators that can help sales reps increase the effectiveness of their email marketing campaigns.
Involving recipients over the long term
Much has been said about the best time of day – or week – to send advertising emails. Indeed, many companies have shown how much adjusting the time of day can contribute to the success of their email marketing campaigns. But there’s no absolute law here: every company must adapt to the desires and needs of its target population. As is often the case, to find the right formula, you need to experiment, trying out several different sending schedules, each time collecting a set of data on recipient reaction. This method is just as useful for improving your automated emails. Since marketing doesn’t always work the first time, automation gives you the opportunity to gradually improve your strategy and the content of your email marketing campaigns. When you make changes, you’ll need to measure their impact on the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. For this, the data you’ve collected on recipients’ reactions will be a great help.
Lost contacts
The churn rate is at the end of every list of key figures for measuring the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns. Usually, we only pay attention to it when it’s abnormally high, but it could be otherwise. Unsubscribe rates are a goldmine for anyone who wants to get an idea of the effectiveness of their segmentation strategy, but also for anyone who wants to know if the content they’re creating really speaks to their recipients. If you’re trying to create new content, a slight rise in the unsubscribe rate may indicate that it’s not adapted to your target population, while a drop in the same rate signals that you’re on the right track. Consulted alongside the unsubscribe rate, the number of times the word “spam” is used, and the number of times your e-mails are blocked, will give you a clearer idea of the number of “lost contacts”. By cross-referencing these indicators, you can enrich the range of tools at your disposal to know the state of your mailing list.
Length of time your emails are viewed
There’s a lot to be learned from the length of time it takes to read messages sent in e-mail marketing campaigns. If web users open a special offer sent by email, take three seconds to read it, click to access the site, then half the objective has been achieved. It would be fully achieved if this click led to a conversion. However, if they do the same when it’s an informative email (about an event, for example), then it’s a failure: they’ve only taken in a tiny fraction of the information contained in the email. To refine your approach, you can associate specific objectives with each email format sent. For example, at least 40% of special offers must be viewed for at least 3 seconds, compared with 10 seconds for ads. By following well-defined KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), your email marketing campaigns should become more effective, and above all, improve over time.
