Email is one of the most effective channels for businesses to reach target audiences. But any email campaign must be well-planned, researched, and built on customer insights.
Any business that gets this right can generate transformative results, with an average ROI of $38 for every dollar invested. And around 80 percent of brands consider email campaigning a major driver of customer acquisition and retention.
The best way to target customers with relevant, engaging emails is to build campaigns around data. Here’s how to get started.
Choose Your Metrics Wisely
Adopting a data-driven strategy for email campaigning enables businesses to measure performance over time. This reveals where emails are doing the job they’re designed for and where improvements could help achieve better results.
Almost 90 percent of businesses view data as their most underutilized asset, but the process of analyzing data can be daunting. A huge amount of data is generated across months and years, and businesses have to decide which metrics they’re going to focus on to gain the most valuable audience insights.
Businesses can learn about emails’ effectiveness, engagement, and success by tracking the following metrics:
Open rates: This metric shows the number of times an email is opened.
Unsubscribe rates: Discover how many subscribers are choosing to opt-out of your emails.
Click-through rates (CTR): See the number of recipients who took action on emails, such as clicking a link.
Bounce rates: Emails may not reach subscribers because of technical issues, the recipient no longer wants to receive them or addresses no longer exist.
Spam rating: A number of email campaign providers assign a spam rating to emails before they’re sent out. This is based on link volume and certain terms associated with spam.
ROI: ROI shows the value of email campaigns. Track purchases generated from individual emails, and subtract the amount invested from the number of sales achieved.
There are other metrics, but these will help you measure engagement and impact over any length of time.
Benchmarking: What it is and Why it Matters
Benchmarking is essential for successful data-driven email campaigning. This refers to the average results across the relevant industry and the business’s previous email campaigns. For example, one valuable benchmark is the number of click-through rates emails in the focus industry achieve over three months.
This would create a standard to aim for and exceed in the future. If the current email campaign is falling far short of the industry average or previous campaigns, businesses can compare them to spot opportunities.
For example, two emails may promote the same event or product, yet the less-successful one might push too hard or feature bland visuals. Identifying key issues like these can lead to more engaging emails.
Audience Segmentation Creates More Effective Email Campaigns
A common problem businesses face when distributing emails is a lack of relevance. Customers are far less likely to take action on an email, or even read it if it offers nothing of interest.
Audience segmentation is one-way businesses can avoid this. Around 90 percent of marketers segment audience data, rather than sending the exact same message to every single subscriber on their list. And segmented campaigns can boost email revenue by as much as 760 percent.
Audiences may be segmented by their purchase habits, the type of products they have bought or tend to buy on a regular basis, the average value of their orders, and the number of purchases made.
Segmenting an audience by purchase habits makes it easier to identify high-value customers, and target them with relevant emails (such as if they’re due to make another repeat purchase).
Location-based segmentation draws on information supplied by customers when they create accounts or buy products. Businesses can target subscribers in different locations with offers on reduced shipping to certain regions, or notifying them of deals or events in their area. There’s no point in sending an email to a customer who has no way to benefit from it.
Behavior segmentation relates to the pages customers browse, the products they put in their carts, whether they abandon carts, and which actions they take on emails. Analyzing this data helps businesses segment customers by interest.
For example, automated emails may be sent when a customer leaves products in their cart to bring them back. Tracking the number of purchases these messages trigger demonstrates how effective they are.
Use Customer Data to Personalize Email Subject Lines and Content
An effective email campaign should focus on building a personal connection with the target audience by addressing them directly. Adding the recipient’s name to the subject line is a great start, such as when sending a welcome email to new subscribers or purchasers, but the content of the email itself should be tailored to satisfy the reader.
Research shows that implementing data-driven personalization into marketing can lead to an ROI of up to eight times the initial spend. This is because emails are designed to resonate with recipients more than generic ones blasted to every contact.
They may contain discount codes on products the customer has purchased before or free shipping on goods aligning with their interests for a limited time. Other ideas include sending news of products the customer might want, personalized with their size (based on past purchases) and the delivery cost to their address.
Different content should be used based on subscribers’ age, occupation, and interests. If data analysis reveals a customer is retired and married, emails promoting products designed for younger audiences will either be ignored or deleted.
Implementing data-gathering and -analysis into an email campaign is an effective way to achieve better results, but a strategic approach is key. Follow the tips explored above to build a solid data-driven campaign
Businesses should take action on data to deliver emails relevant and exciting enough to increase conversions. Focus on segmenting the audience accurately and emphasizing personalization.
Over time, businesses can build emails that stand out in even the most crowded inboxes.
