How to take your email marketing to the next level

7 key areas of focus to review and improve your email marketing capability

The last couple of days, I’ve been attending the International Email Expo at Frankfurt. It’s been nice to listen to and discuss the latest advice from email marketing consulting friends old and new @JordieVan Rijn, @KathPay, @TamaraGielen, @DelaQuist, Bruno Florence, @pignonsurmail, Philip Storey, @MichaelLeander and last but not least, my host Torsten Schwarz.

It’s been good to see how email marketing in thriving in Europe. It’s no more than what you would expect since email remains a core communications channel and Email drives far more revenue than social media. It’s been interesting to see from the talks and when judging the email marketing awards some really advanced examples of targeted, relevant emails which are delivering excellent results.

Reviewing your email marketing capability

In my talk I was looking to help attendees diagnose the opportunities for making their email marketing more efficient and effective by benchmarking their email activities across their overall email programme. I also introduced a new way to review email marketing we have developed at Smart Insights across 7 key areas for managing email marketing - all Smart Insights members can download this new, free managing email marketing checklist.

Previously, I have explained on this blog how it’s useful to audit overall digital marketing maturity in a business. Through completing such an audit you can be more strategic in your digital marketing, set priorities and develop a roadmap for future improvements to processes or introducing new digital technologies or communications.

This approach of benchmarking capabilities can work well for managing other digital marketing channels like email marketing too. I’ve thought this since I saw this presentation from retailer Argos mapping their development of email marketing.

It's an old example, but the techniques used to create more relevance like dynamic content, better segmentation, triggered emails and testing and optimisation.

When looking to improve email marketing I pointed out that I think it’s important to improve both efficiency and effectiveness - there is a risk that improving email can focus on factors like delivery and template layout and calls-to-action where it’s really the targeting and segmentation methods and email communications strategy which will have the biggest impact.

I hope you find this capability review approach to auditing your email marketing useful - I’m always interested in feedback to improve. I’m just listening to Kath Pay talking about integration and that’s maybe an area of the checklist to be improved, although we do encourage thinking about email in the context of the whole customer journey and experience, so thinking about how we can integrate email through other customer touch points like search, display and social media marketing.