Getting your email out there, making sure it gets read and doing all you can to guarantee its relevance is just the start. Businesses that really understand email marketing know that the key differentiator is the ability to track, measure and tweak.
In fact, without proper scrutiny of data there is little chance of ever becoming a successful email marketer. Unless you really understand your audience and how it interacts with your campaign, you are never going to refine the communication, to improve the design, to craft the truly targeted message.
Much has been made of email’s ability to be tracked and measured. It is often cited as one of the key advantages of marketing through the medium. However, most marketers are not drilling deep enough and exploiting the true potential of the facts and figures at their disposal.
Despite what they may say publicly, many marketers – if they are being honest – will admit to reporting being a blind spot. A common complaint is that marketers don’t have the time to pore over statistics and auger meaning.
Time and energy
You have to make the time and invest the energy. Your business has to examine what content its audience finds interesting in order that future campaigns can be made even more relevant and achieve even greater levels of cut-through.
If you see that users are interacting with content, treat this with the urgency and energy it deserves. Follow up the email communication with a telephone call, invitations to relevant events and so on. Watching a customer clicking through from an email into a piece of content on your website is as close as you’re going to get to a come on. Don’t miss the opportunity to pounce!
Understanding what that user finds useful and interesting will help you avoid falling into the trap of continuing to send irrelevant content in future campaigns. Every interaction will generate data and help build a fuller picture of the person with whom you are communicating.
Compare that situation with direct mail. Small mail campaigns would take weeks and often weren’t effective because the business could not track results properly. With email, results are almost instantaneous. Technology can enable the marketer to track everything: who looked at what, for how long, where they went next, who became undeliverable to who opted out.
The fact that email can tell you all of this is fantastic news for all the old-school direct marketers, but what use is knowledge without application? Seeing how many people opted out following a campaign is great, but it’s what you do with that information that counts.
Stop the rot
Losing one contact from your database is unfortunate, but without understanding the reasons why that person may have opted out, you’ve little chance of stopping similar prospects doing likewise. Attrition is a big enough problem in B2C, but in B2B the situation is amplified.
The value of an individual within a database is far higher in B2B than in B2C. The potential transaction value is higher, but the numbers of people you can communicate to is far scarcer. The pool from which you are drawing may only contain a few thousand people. If people start opting out – and you’ve no idea why – you are in danger of destroying the whole channel.
Scrutinise the email campaign. Really pull it apart and work out how it all fits together, how do the constituent parts work and what happens if some are altered, refined or deleted?
It’s only by running these tests, sending out different iterations of a campaign to different segments of the database, that you will be able to test the notion of personalised and targeted messages. You can see what works and what doesn’t. All the while you are learning, studying the data, and improving the performance of future campaigns.
Ask the right questions
This is where most businesses fail spectacularly. Once the campaign has closed, they will be sitting on all manner of statistics, but very few companies will actually use this information.
How many of you ask rigorous questions of your data? How did the personalised campaign compare to the one that wasn’t personalised? You’ve got a group who are interacting with the email, so what do you do next? How do you nudge them along the sales cycle? Are they the people who should now receive a DM piece? A telephone call? Do you have any idea? Could you get an idea by looking at past campaigns?
These are challenging questions, but the answers can be hugely rewarding. Especially as so few of your competitors will be anything like this savvy.
Worse, many businesses think they are tracking and measuring and testing, but they’re not.
They may look at the spike in traffic, or be wowed by the user journey, but few will apply the underlying data to the optimisation of future campaigns. The response to data is often reactive rather than proactive.
From bad news to good
Opt-outs and undeliverables are the classic data sets that are undervalued by marketers. Often seen as bad news, they are buried and forgotten about. But getting to grips with this information and really understanding it can yield significant results.
For example, one undeliverable address could mean that a new person is now in a purchasing position. This is someone your business should be contacting. If you are able to get to that person and build a relationship before your competitor, you have gained a significant advantage. All thanks to proper scrutiny of your data.
Look at the user journey. Where are they going? What content is being used? For how long is it being looked at? Are users skipping over certain content and downloading others?
Look at this data and find out what’s proving useful to your audience. Strengthen that content and deliver similar material. Revise and even delete the areas that aren’t working. Give the user more of what they are interested in – it will make your entire proposition more pertinent and better allied to the user experience.
Data can be daunting to the uninitiated, but to the trained eye it can be the key differentiator between you and your competitors. If you make that data sweat you will gain valuable insights into your database. If you don’t, contacts will drop away and be picked up by those around you.