Email marketing has a large number of metrics that help judge the success of your campaigns. But how should you view these metrics in light of your overall marketing and business objectives? And if you use marketing automation software, how can this help?
I sat down with Christopher S. Penn, author of Marketing White Belt and Vice President of Marketing Technology at SHIFT Communications. We discussed how marketers should measure the success of their email marketing campaigns, and how to use marketing automation software to optimize your campaigns.
How Should Marketers Measure the Success of Email Marketing?
Of all the marketing channels, email has the highest ROI per dollar spent. The Direct Marketing Association pegged it on average at $39.56 per dollar invested.
Whatever your end goal metric is, whether it's lead generation, closed deals, or revenue, that's what you should be judging your email marketing program by.
Email has a lot of diagnostic metrics. There are open rates, click-through rates, click-to-action rates, forwards, social shares, etc. These are useful diagnostics, but they aren't the end goal. If you focus only on these metrics, you'll lose sight of your main goal: did we grow the business or didn't we?
How Should Marketers Use Marketing Automation Software?
It depends on the package you have and what your end goals are. If you're just sending email, you might just need an email service provider. But if you're using marketing automation for lead scoring, sales/CRM integration, etc., you'll want to map the software as close to your business processes as you can.
If you're doing a lot of things that are buying signals, such as looking at white papers or checking out things on a website that are buying-intent pages, then marketing automation systems will help detect that and send more targeted emails.
This is much better than just mass-advertising to people who are not at a buying stage. Using a marketing automation software to its full extent allows you to send buying-type content to people who are at that stage and not sending that same content to people not ready to buy.
