Why email marketing is not dead and how you can maximise its ROI for your business

Not only is email marketing delivering the best ROI, but additional research supports that email marketing engagement is on the rise, as brands focus on higher-quality subscribers, improved campaign targeting and increased success rates. According to the Acoustic 2019 Marketing Benchmark Report email open rates and click-through rates have increased steadily each year since 2014 (by a total of 19% and 14%respectively). The report attributes this to a shift in marketing trends as a result of Privacy regulations which limit how data can be used, forcing brands to find new ways to drive loyalty without jeopardizing the privacy of consumers.

So, how do you manage your email campaigns to ensure that you get the best possible results? Here’s our top 11tips:

Make your content timely and relevant: Recipients are 75% more likely to click on emails from segmented campaigns than non-segmented campaigns. (MailChimp, 2017) When marketers fail to understand the complexity and nuance of how customers’ core characteristics evolve, people lose trust in them. The 2019 Marketing Benchmark report showed that transaction emails triggered by a customer’s specific behavior have an average open rate 20 percentage points higher than non-transactional emails (such as promotional offers or newsletters). So ensure that your customer data is up to date and in line with their actual purchasing behaviour to ensure that the content is relevant to them.

Welcome new customers: First impressions last.  The first email that you receive when you subscribe to any list, or shop with a company for the first time, is heralded as one of the most effective relationship building tool, generating a whopping 320% added revenue (on a per email basis) compared to other promotional emailing campaigns. Use your welcome email as a way to introduce your company to your customer, inform, cross-sell and up-sell and ultimately, begin the process of building a long-standing relationship with your new customer.

Automate: Automation is a great way to engage with your customers along their experience journey with you. You can automate via

• activity triggers (ie, when the customer does ‘something’ such as visit your website, make a purchase, abandons the shopping cart, etc) or
• time triggers (ie, a certain number of days or weeks after you last communicated with them).

Automation not only increases the relevance of your communication with individual customers, but increases your overall business efficiencies.  

Tell stories: People don’t buy your product, they buy the story behind it. And the same goes for email marketing. By telling stories, you’ll increase your customer engagement, and likely improve your click-through to your website or shopping cart.

Be mobile: And while data shows that 50% of emails are opened via mobile devices, it also suggests mobile readers who(actually) open an email a second time from a computer are 65% more likely to click through. This suggests that making the content mobile-friendly is essential.

Incorporate video: More than 70% of businesses credit video with boosting their conversion rate. And 52% of consumers say watching product promos instills them with confidence when making online purchase decisions. And good video content is memorable - Studies show that people have the ability to recall 65% of the visual content that they see almost three days later.

Keep your lists clean: Ensuring that your data is up to date and compliant with the Australian Privacy Act will not only keep you out of trouble, but you’ll be investing in marketing to the right people -ensuring that you receive better open and click through results from your communications. 

Segment your data: Receiving communication that is unwanted or not relevant is the best way to drive someone to hit the ‘unsubscribe’ button. So ask your customer what they want to hear about, and then give it to them. This could include asking their preferences in your welcome email, asking them to complete or update their profile, or segmenting based on previous purchases or activity.

Timing is everything: Long-standing email open rate data suggests that Tuesdays - Thursdays are the best days to send, with Tuesdays being the highest ranked. However, this could be different for your business or your customers, and varies from industry to industry, so always best to test and adjust accordingly.

Understand what the data is telling you: Marketers must grapple with how they can serve consumers’ individual needs, expressed on the customers’ own terms, through the innovative use of AI technologies and curation platforms. Instead of running your data through spreadsheets, by accessing more commonly available technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and other machine-learning solutions, you’ll be able to identify the customers who are engaged and looking for more information from you, and those who are experiencing contact fatigue, and customise the message (and frequency of contact) relevant to them. 

Analyse, benchmark and edit: After each campaign, know your numbers, and check them for performance against industry benchmarks - for example Vision6, which is updated each month. Incorporating split testing will help you to determine the best results from small nuances in your communication, from your subject line to your call to action. And by making small adjustments along the way, you’ll be able to optimise your impact and customer communication outcomes. 

How can DMC Group help you with your email marketing needs?

DMC Group recognises that each company has specific requirements and processes to manage their business needs, while needing to leverage best practice and avoid unnecessary complexity.  DMC Group takes care of the production end of your marketing activities, for a seamless communication of your brand, so you can focus on delivering an outstanding experience for your consumer and communities.  We save our clients time, money and resources. 

Speak to one of our team today to see how we can help your business reach its communication and brand awareness potential to new customers while retaining your existing consumers.

Further reading:

Maximising your email marketing campaigns, Vision 6.

Email marketing stats you need to know, Campaign Monitor.

Five email tests you need to run now for better email results

Why marketers should keep sending you emails.

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