How to Use Email Marketing to Strengthen Customer Relationships and Increase Sales
By: Daniel Hopper
Tags: Strategy, Email Marketing, Marketing, Business, Digital Marketing

Objectives of email marketing

Email Newsletters are great not only for marketing to prospects but also for nurturing your existing customers. Some of the objectives of using email marketing are:

Send recipients to other marketing content such as landing pages with exclusive offers, blog posts or other valuable content.

such as landing pages with exclusive offers, blog posts or other valuable content. Communicate with a community, customers, employees or other stakeholders to generate a reaction or a result.

with a community, customers, employees or other stakeholders to generate a reaction or a result. Inform the reader about a new offer or send them to a blog post.

about a new offer or send them to a blog post. Maintain and develop long term relationships with current customers.

with current customers. Motivate customers to finish a purchase who have items in their shopping cart that was abandoned.

who have items in their shopping cart that was abandoned. Increase sales by converting more leads into customers and selling more to previous customers.

Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash

Analysing the results of your email marketing

One of the major benefits of email marketing is the ability to monitor subscriber engagement and interest.

It is a process of continual improvement — testing and tweaking your email content and database management. To analyse the performance of your email marketing, there are several key metrics to help measure the performance of each campaign against previous benchmarks.

For example, analysing the interaction that people have with your website after they click on a link, this can help you pinpoint how to improve the user experience on your website. Two different landing pages could be used to test which one receives better results.

Open rate is the proportion of people opened the email. But this can be an inaccurate gauge as customers who are active in opening a firm’s emails may not be active in purchasing and vice versa. Some people are more responsive to emails. Others may purchase but never open their emails.

Therefore, it is important to track more factors than just your open rate, such as tracking your click-through rates and conversion rates.

Bounce rate is the total emails sent that could not be delivered to the recipient’s inbox, If one particular campaign has a lower than average delivery rate (high bounce rate), examine the subject line and content of that message to check if there’s something that could have flagged it as spam.

The list growth rate is how fast your email list is growing. This is calculated by subtracting opt-outs and hard bounces from the number of new email subscribers gained per month.

“Be clear to your target market about what they will get out of subscribing to your emails. Give them a clear description of what the value proposition is. For example, will your emails offer: (1) tips and tools on how to run their business more efficiently, (2) product updates from your company, or (3) special offers via email? Your audience will want to know “why” they should subscribe before they decide to clutter their inbox with even more emails.” (Georgieva, 2012)

Unsubscribe rate is the proportion of people in your database who unsubscribe from receiving your emails. This is not always a reliable picture of the health of your email list, however, as many subscribers no longer want to receive emails will not bother to go through the formal unsubscribe process.

They will just stop opening email messages and delete them instead.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) is a foundation of email marketing analytics, as it indicates whether the message was relevant and the offer compelling enough to check out. This measure how many people click on the offer or other link in your email.

Conversion rate is the proportion of people who clicked a link and completed the desired action, such as purchasing a product. This is also dependent on factors beyond the original email message, such as the quality of your landing page or the offer itself.

“Conversion rate is the ultimate measure of an email campaign’s effectiveness. The higher your conversion rate, the more relevant and compelling the offer was for your audience.” (Georgieva, 2012)

Revenue per email measures the ROI of an email campaign, calculated by dividing the total revenue generated from the campaign by the number of emails sent. This is only relevant if you generate a lot of direct sales from email campaigns.