How Can You Tell if Your Emails Are Effective?

Email marketing is one of the most underrated marketing techniques, especially for small businesses who rely on word-of-mouth to expand and grow their business. In this blog, we’ll take a look at why your business should be investing more resources into developing effective email campaigns and how you can evaluate and improve their utility.

Why Are Email Campaigns Important to Businesses?

There are a variety of reasons why email campaigns are a critical part of any business’s marketing strategy, but the most important of which is cost-effectiveness. Emails cost little to no money for a business to send; while you may spend time and money on creating worthy content, this marketing format is far more affordable than, say, print or TV advertising, or a direct mail campaign. Plus, much of this content is likely gathering materials already created, or vis versa can be repurposed for social media or other uses. Let’s take a look at five ways you can evaluate and improve your emails’ effectiveness.

Five Ways You Can Evaluate the Effectiveness of Your Emails

#1: Start by Reviewing What Makes an “Effective” Email

The best place to start is at the drawing board. For this step, review what makes an email more likely to be “successful,” and define what that success means. Start by defining the goal for the email, then ensure that you build the content (the text and images) with this goal in mind. Regardless of how hard you push an email campaign, it will underperform if the content is lackluster.

For more information about how to improve your email campaigns, check out this post: Improve Your Email Campaigns.

#2: Run A/B Testing All the Time

You don’t need a specific reason to start an A/B test; you could do a test simply to see which of two subject lines gets more “opens”. Repeated A/B tests on different aspects of an email can help you get to know your audience. Once you know how your email audience responds to different words, styles, and images, you can maximize your email campaigns’ effectiveness by playing right to their likes.

#3: Before You Send Out the First Email in a Campaign, Review It

If you have a trusted, from-the-beginning client or marketing expert on your side, send the email to them for review before you send it to your whole list. This individual can help you see the content from the clients’ point of view, especially if you are struggling to visualize this. Your emails should be targeting a specific audience; most great emails shouldn’t get sent out to a company’s entire list. P.S. This means you should be segmenting your list into groups with the same interests as soon as you can and diligent on managing those groups.

#4: Keep an Eye on Your Analytics: Opens & Interactions

There’s more to email success than developing and sending an effective email. You could create the perfect email, perfectly targeted for a subset of your clientele; however, if you send it to the wrong list, your email will underperform and you may never know unless you watch your email analytics.

Email analytics tools will keep a record of how many emails get a) delivered to the recipient, b) are seen by the recipient, c) get opened by the recipient, and d) are interacted with (links are clicked). You want your emails to have both a high open rate and a high interaction rate.

#5: Keep an Eye on Your Analytics: Conversions & Other Statistics

Another component of analytics can keep track of your email campaign’s conversion ratio. A/B testing is a great way to compare the conversion ratios of different iterations of the same email. Your analytics tool may also keep track of demographics for you. This will help you further target clients with your future campaigns.

BONUS: In tracking your emails in Analytics, Google and others offer many tools, but Google Campaign Builder can build specific links that you can use to track in analytics.

Playing the Game: Constant Evaluation & Tweaks

Email marketing is not a stagnant field; great marketing experts are constantly running tests and optimizing emails for their target audience, then repeating the process mere days or weeks later. Understanding that optimization is a constant, persistent strategy may help you and your business get a better handle on email marketing. The team at Marketing Matters also wants you to know that you don’t have to do all of this alone! Hiring a marketing team for your small to medium sized business isn’t as complicated as you might think; contact us for more information.