10 email strategy factors to audit your email marketing effectiveness
Update: Dec 2014. See this post for our latest guidance on benchmarking email effectiveness where you can review your email capabilities using our new chart.
Despite the growth in popularity of social media marketing, email marketing remains the best customer communications tool for most companies since:
- More personally relevant emails can be delivered as subscribers are targeted by:
- Demographics like age, gender, geography
- Previous purchase or download categories
- Time since previous interaction
- Position in lifecycle - new customers are sent different messages from old
- Following up on a website interaction like a search, category browse or an abandoned shopping cart - if your systems are joined up
- Offers and content can be inserted dynamically into the email to target with these techniques
- Cut-through and overall response is greater with response occurring over 12-48 hours rather than 1-2 hours more typical of Twitter and Facebook
- Response measurable at individual level offering better follow-up on customer interest via additional emails or other channels
- It can be integrated with social media activities to increase engagement with customers
But there are many pitfalls with email marketing such as getting emails delivered through spam filters, displaying properly in different browsers. So to get the most from email marketing a strategy is useful to review your existing approach and improve targeting, frequency and delivery.
At the time of the post, the effectiveness factors control the relevance of a message, they are:
- Effectiveness 1: Aims and goal setting.
- Effectiveness 2: Segmentation and targeting.
- Effectiveness 3: Communications strategy.
- Effectiveness 4: Creative and copywriting.
- Effectiveness 5: Testing and optimization.
Efficiency factors are the "hygiene factors" needed to make your email campaigns and enewsletters work well. Improving your capabilities for each of these efficiency factors right will all help improve your results.
- Efficiency 1: List Quality.
- Efficiency 2: Legal compliance.
- Efficiency 3: Email deliverability.
- Efficiency 4: Email Templates and renderability.
- Efficiency 5: Email Management Systems.
I collaborated with many email marketing consultants, agencies and email service providers to make sure the latest thinking and techniques are incorporated, so thanks to everyone in the expert review team - I've listed everyone at the end of this post, because they really helped shape it.
Diagnostic tool to assess your email marketing capabilities
A central feature of the guide is this diagnostic tool I developed with the reviewers, my client email projects in 2009 and 2 roundtables with client-side email marketers arranged through Econsultancy.
This chart is a presentation summary of a more detailed table in the guide and a benchmarking spreadsheet you can use to score your email marketing in each of these areas to give an overall score.
We haven't yet made the benchmarking spreadsheet available on the Econsultancy website yet, so please contact me if you would like a free copy.
In the Econsultancy Best Practice Guides we advocate assessing your current digital marketing capabilities using capability maturity or stage of adoption models. We first used this approach in our Managing Digital Channels Best Practice Guide. You can download the digital strategy benchmarking spreadsheet from my old blog site. Econsultancy members have told us that they find these useful since they enable organisations:
1. Review current approaches to digital marketing to identify areas for improvement.
2. Benchmark with competitors who are in the same market sector / industry and in different sectors.
3. Identify best practice from more advanced adopters.
4. Set targets and develop strategies for improving capabilities as part of an improvement roadmap.
Top resources for Email Marketing
Even if you don't download the Email Marketing Guide, I hope you will find these resources, which we list in the Appendix of the Guide useful.
This is our selection, in alpha order of the best blogs and sites to keep up-to-date on Email marketing practice. While many agencies and ESPs have blogs and other resources, these are the personal favourites of Dave Chaffey which he follows via Twitter/RSS.
As always, if you disagree or think I'm missing a great resource, please let me know via the comments.
We recommend these sites as the best blogs to find out more about email marketing:
The Expert Reviewers
Thank you all! Especially those who contributed in-depth reviews that really helped shape The Econsultancy Best Practice Guide to Email Marketing.