Email is thriving across the globe due to it’s accessibility, familiarity and extremely high return on investment. According to a study by one predictive analytics company, customer acquisition via email has quadrupled in the last four years and now accounts for 7% of customer acquisitions.
It’s 2014 and we’re fairly certain you’re using either Hubspot, Constant Contact, Mad Mimi, MailChimp or some other similar platform to push newsletters, specials, offers and information to your contacts. With the increased use of smartphones and tablets, you (the marketer) have the opportunity to squeeze out every last ounce of ROI is amplified, as users have literally 24/7 access to incoming messages.
You may have already experienced a high return on investment and that’s great! But what if we told you that you could improve your email ROI further by asking yourself these 5 questions.
1. Why are you sending this email?
Is your main goal to educate users? Announce an awesome upcoming event? Promote a new product? Are you sending this email because your contact base has a history of engaging with email campaigns?
Thinking this out before you begin executing. It will help to drive your goal home from the get go.
2. Who is your audience?
Think about your audience for a minute. Will they be interested in the content you’re sending out?
Being mindful of the content you send to your contacts is the number one way to increase engagement.
For example:
You’re a pet store sending an email to all of your contacts make sure that the messaging is broad enough to appeal to all of them in some small way. The last thing you want to do is send an email all about about cats to a contact who has a historical attachment to dogs.
Sending an email out about a 10% off sale may be more appropriate.
And remember, when you’re sending to a subset make sure that the message is targeted and all of the appropriate pieces are catered towards this special group of contacts.
3. What do you want your reader to do?
Think about what you want your readers to do when they receive your email. Besides the obvious answer, “click through the email.”
Do you want them to download a resource? Attend an event? Purchase a product or service? These are important questions to ask when setting up an email campaign and they tie directly into the creation of your *CTA’s, or calls to action.
*Keep in mind that the surrounding factors (Imagery, Messaging, Etc) will all impact the likeliness of a user actually clicking through your CTA’s.
4. Why should a reader take the action you are asking them to do?
This question is a huge one.
Why should your reader click through? What’s in it for them? It’s a question I ask myself for virtually every email I receive and you can bet your bottom dollar that your contacts are too. This should be clear in your head and more importantly, depicted in the email copy.
Will they get free shipping? Receive important information? Get free ice cream?
If there is no messaging compelling the user to take action you can consider your campaign dead in the water.
5. What is your success metric?
This one seems like a no brainer, but you’d be surprised to know that many marketers begin an email campaign without creating a KPI (key performance indicator) of any kind.
If you’re not currently gaging the success of your email campaigns, consider the following:
- Are there past campaigns similar to the current campaign that you can use to compare results?
- What are the historical industry results for such campaigns?
- What is the ideal number of actions you need in order to consider the campaign a success?
Share some of the questions you ask yourself before beginning an email campaign in the comments.