Begin email marketing or marketing automation with measurement of performance in mind.
You should measure/track the performance of your email campaigns (or each email you have sent) beyond only opens (i.e. open rate) or clicks ((i.e. click through rate). When your program allows, you should track replies, forwards, geo locations, the email clients your subscribers are using, and more.
You should work out the revenue you have generated through all the email marketing campaigns. At the end you need to know which email actually works, which email works better than other emails, and more. It is all about revenue reporting. To make this possible, it will involve having website tracking and analytics implemented.
A/B testing (or split testing) is usually an effective method to work out quickly which email actually works, and/or which email works better than other emails. Depending on the number of contacts in your lists, you may split test up to thousands of receivers. The elements you can split test include subject lines, text content, images, the from field, calls-to-actions, etc.
For marketers and/or small business owners, activecampaign(a marketing automation tool) can provide the custom reporting that is flexible with adding tags and custom fields. This way, you can build the reports with your test results.
Consider a few more aspects when you are seriously making email marketing one of your best marketing channels.
Do you have a good enough welcome series emails? This depends on whether you are reaching out to the new people (who signs up or subscribes) at the right time, not all at one time. When you are able to automate the emails, you can schedule when they are sent. The timing is important as it affects engagement.
Drip Campaigns are a series of emails. But they are not exactly like welcome emails.A well-designed automated workflow can nurture leads. It wouldre-send emails whenthe receivers did not open their emails.It would improve the product onboarding experience of your users.The end goal is to convincethem that yourproduct is exactly what they want and get them to purchase.
Management of subscription is another aspect to consider.Automated emails will become very simple and quick to set up. Then you would run into a situation when you are sending too many emails to your contacts.If your contacts start to unsubscribe, you may have to make a decision to reduce the number of emails.
It may be difficult for marketers to see a big picture of all the automated emails and series of emails. An automation map allows you to visualize the customer journey that you have built. Only when knowing this important information, marketers will be able to plan ahead and optimize their email campaign efforts
