How Small Businesses Can Make the Most of Email Marketing

For many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the pandemic was the nudge they needed to embrace digital technologies email marketing Software. Plus new challenges like inflation And labor shortage have left small businesses lacking the time and resources to maintain a solid marketing program. A recently Law! Opinion poll found that 69% of SME owners handle all of their company’s marketing tasks. Email marketing technology has quickly become a necessity for SMBs looking to keep up with the competition.

With ROI being the top priority for many of these SMB owners, getting the most out of their email marketing is paramount. To achieve this, companies must first set clear goals and then use the necessary tools to measure the success of those goals and simplify email marketing processes.

Related: Without these three basics, your email marketing is doomed to fail

SMART goals

We all know the acronym: Successful email marketing starts with recruitment SMART goals that properly define and measure the goals of an email campaign. If you’re not sure what your email campaigns are doing, start by asking yourself two questions:

1. Do you have SMART goals?
2. Are you measuring your progress effectively?

Oftentimes, SMBs create email marketing campaigns with ill-defined goals (at best), such as “creating awareness of a new product.” Even if you can track things like impressions, does that really determine the notoriety you’ve created around the product?

Email marketing campaigns must target a specific, measurable outcome, e.g. B. on generating new leads, improving conversion rates and growing a subscriber list. When email campaign goals aren’t properly defined and tracked, it can result in missed opportunities and uninformed decisions down the line.

The metrics Your team’s successes should be determined by the goal of your email campaign. For example, if your goal is to increase the time visitors stay on your site, you should track Total Time On Site (TOS) while also monitoring bounce rates to see if page improvements are enticing users to stay longer remain. If the goal is to generate leads, teams should track lead source viability over time, leads by campaign type, and average number of touchpoints to conversion. To generate successful email marketing campaigns, marketers must first define clear goals and the metrics to track them.

Related: 6 Marketing Metrics Every Business Should Track

The metrics you absolutely need to track

While every email campaign requires teams to track certain goal-specific metrics, there are key metrics that should be tracked in virtually every marketing campaign.

1. Click Through Rate (CTR)

This is the percentage of recipients who click on one or more links in your email. Many email marketers obsess over email open rate, but open rate can be a misleading statistic. It’s hardly a success if recipients just open your email without click through to the website, whitepaper or other call-to-action (CTA) you provide. CTR gives teams a much better understanding of how compelling their content was to the recipient.

2. Conversion Rate

The Exchange rate Analyzing your email campaign goes one step further and tells you how many recipients both clicked on an email link and took the requested action (try a product, fill out a survey, fill out a form). Conversion rate is one of the most important metrics to track as it is directly related to the campaign objective. Whether recipients want to sign up for a mailing list or watch a product video, conversion rate is an effective measure of how engaging and compelling your email marketing content is.

3. Bounce Rate

bounce rates refer to the percentage of emails that were not successfully delivered to your recipients’ inboxes. Marketing teams should track both “soft” and “hard” bounces. Soft bounces are emails that can’t be delivered because a recipient’s inbox is full or due to some other temporary delivery issue. Hard bounces are emails that cannot be delivered because the recipient’s email address does not exist on the server.

While soft bounces tend to get through to the recipient, hard bounces can be more problematic because ISPs use your hard bounce rate to gauge your reputation as a sender. So if your company’s email account has a lot of hard bounces, service providers could flag it as a spam account and all your emails could end up in spam folders.

4. Return on Investment (ROI)

The ROI indicates how much revenue an email marketing campaign generates after costs. For example, if an email marketing campaign costs $100 to implement and generates $2,000 in additional sales for your business, you will make $1,900 ROI is 1,900%. To ensure accuracy, it’s important to calculate all of the costs associated with your email marketing campaign throughout its duration (such as the cost of the staff who write and send the emails).

While not every email marketing campaign generates a 1,900% ROI, teams that consistently track this and other must-track metrics can be able to identify needs and continue to make campaign improvements based on data.

Related: How to use email to market your small business

Simplifying email marketing metrics

Whether they are goal-specific metrics or metrics you should track at every step Email Marketing Campaign, there is a lot of data to manage. Marketing teams that can simplify the collection and analysis of email marketing metrics avoid leaking valuable data or wasting time on unprofitable campaigns.

One way to organize email marketing metrics and streamline analytics is to integrate email marketing tools with CRM software. By using CRM with email marketing, teams can easily access contact information, leave notes or update customer history right in their contact information and most importantly, build targeted email lists.

By integrating email marketing with CRM, teams can streamline an end-to-end email marketing campaign, from building audiences to capturing and analyzing key metrics—all from a single platform. This eliminates the need to port data from one solution to another – increasing the risk of data loss or oversight – and provides a centralized view of the entire email marketing campaign.

With ongoing challenges, the ability to streamline email marketing campaigns can help SMBs save money while gaining a competitive edge. SMBs that take the time to set clear goals, understand how to measure the success of those goals, and make it easy to analyze key metrics will not only see continuous improvement in their email marketing efforts, but will also have a positive impact on achieve the bottom line of their business.