How to get the most out of your email channel

This post originally appears in Adweek.  Check it out here!

It’s easy to overlook traditional email when compared with interactive and higher cost channels like paid display and social. With the right level of attention and integration, however, this reliable and low-cost workhorse can be your secret weapon to improving acquisition and retention performance of all your campaigns. This article will show how email contributes to company performance and suggest 4 ways to improve your own email marketing performance. 

   

Why Email? 

Email is core to the customer relationship.  Email is the first piece of customer information captured.  Often used as the user ID and the customer identifier, the email address is the most reliable two-way connection with a customer.

Email also delivers.  According to a June report from OneSpot, conducted by The Relevancy Group, US marketing executives said email attributed 21% of the total revenues in Q2 2017, up 17% year over year.  eMarketer’s 2017 email marketing Benchmark set the median email marketing ROI at 122%, four times higher than any other digital marketing channel.    

There’s room to improve. As demand Metrics/Return Path recent survey suggests, less than half of the respondents are seeing email performance improvements. eConsultancy’s 2018 email marketing census agrees, with its top finding that email continues to be the most effective marketing channel, though fewer marketers report stellar performance

 If organizations recognize the opportunity, why are so few capitalizing on it?

What’s missing is a comprehensive strategy

Many marketing teams allocate talent and focus in line with channel budget rather than channel impact. When this happens, there is a tendency to create brand and media strategies with email as an afterthought rather than a central component.  These companies miss the chance for their email to connect the dots between channels and weave together a personal narrative with compelling call to actions to close the deal. 

Here are 4 steps with specific actions you can take to improve your email marketing performance:

1. Master the numbers.  Get to know the core KPI’s: sent, bounced, received, opened, converted, unsubscribed, removed. Spend some time understanding where you are on each of these measures and the “leakage” from each stage to the next. 

Action: Include an email KPI dashboard in regular marketing meetings. 

Action: Determine targets and strategies to improve important areas including simple tweaks like subject lines, timing and frequency.

2. Earn your access.  Don’t mistake access for interest, excessive amounts of emails with low content value is a sure way to an unsubscribe.  Beyond the active unsubscribes, email service providers (ESP’s) like gmail passively manage your access to their subscribers using a sender relationship score.  A few negative scoring email “bomb’s” in a row can cause gmail to throttle your sends by up to 90%, temporarily sidelining communications with close to 40% of your total subscribers. 

Action: Lean in Opt-in. Embrace GDPR, Canned Spam, TCPA, and other regulations as minimum standards to earning and keeping a subscriber’s interest.

Action: Less is More. Try to remove 25% your current email campaigns by eliminating redundancies or reducing send frequency. Alternatively, set a max # emails per day/week/month with an escalation process for exceptions. 

Action: Give to Get. Revamp the remaining emails with a give to get strategy in the form of information, entertainment, access, and discounts. 

3. Integrate into the strategy: While most email campaigns focus on short term objectives, there is a huge opportunity for companies to enhance long term relationship through multi-step campaigns.  For example, a for-profit university used an email survey to capture personal motivations for pursuing a degree from all their new inquiries. This one-two approach keeps the request for information (RFI) simple while capturing deeply personal insights on the value points in a prospect’s buying decision.  These insights can then be used to prioritize the values to highlight in a personalized narrative that improves the messaging performance across all channels. 

Action: Reframe Success.  Now that you’ve mastered and improved the basics of email KPI’s, its time to reframe what a successful email campaign means.  Select a few subscriber behaviors that matter to the business (RFI, download, speak with an agent, start /complete an application, purchase, repurchase,.. ).  Now link an entire campaign to the successful completion of that action on any channel.     

Action: Develop a long play. Look at your entire acquisition or retention lifecycle.  Identify drop-offs in the narrative which would benefit from reinforcement or a deeper insight into the customer’s intent.  Start building short sequences of cross channel reinforcement narratives aligned to encouraging a measurable subscriber behavior.  Expand once you get the hang of it to extend the reach and performance from paid and organic channels.

4.     Capture, review, learn, repeat.  Email is an ideal candidate for rigorous A/B and multi-variate testing to accelerate learnings and build a culture of continuous improvement. 

Action: Test and learn. Build a campaign test governance process to track KPI’s and defined subscriber behaviors over time.  Set small improvement goals and encourage tinkering and discovery.   

Action: Test less and none. For non-essential campaigns, consider using short-term control groups who are excluded from email campaigns to better understand email’s true cross-channel contribution. 

Despite its low cost, email delivers outsized results for marketers who know how to best integrate it into the overall engagement strategy.  By learning how to best harness its power to recognize, reinforce, and remind, brands can realize significant improvements conversion and retention efforts.