What is data-driven email marketing?
Data-driven email marketing is using email marketing strategies to generate leads, nurture subscribers, and convert prospects while collecting and paying close attention to various email marketing metrics. As you’ve probably heard before, data is king. The better data you collect from your subscribers (behavior, intent, open rate, click-through rate, content relevance, etc) the more you learn about your audience and the better you can cater to them.
While email marketing on its own is trying to generate leads, nurture subscribers, and convert prospects, data-driven email marketing is trying to do all of those things, but with a real tangible knowledge of how different types of email campaigns affect your audience and how they perceive you.
Why is data-driven email marketing important?
Anyone can send emails to an audience of several thousand people and call themself an email marketer. But an expert email marketer doesn’t just send emails, they learn to read the data of how different emails perform with a specific audience, they set benchmarks, and they try to improve upon those benchmarks.
This is important because, even with all the email marketing tips, tricks, and tactics available online, every list of subscribers is different. This means that some tactics will work with your audience and some won’t.
How do you know which ones work and which ones don’t?
By testing, paying close attention to results, and iterating based on what you learn. That is data-driven email marketing.
A quick note about the danger of data silos…
For businesses with a lot of moving parts — multiple teams, departments, and leaders — it’s important to discuss the danger of data silos.
Data silos, as it pertains to email marketing, refers to when an email marketer takes action without the necessary data to support that action. In most cases, this happens because higher-ups have exclusive access to certain metrics or the email marketer simply wasn’t experienced enough to take certain metrics into account.
Whatever the case, data silos decrease the chance of running effective email marketing campaigns for one simple reason: the person writing and sending emails doesn’t have access to the data necessary to run an effective email marketing campaign. This further means that the campaigns they do run are nothing better than hopeful attempts at engaging with their audience.
Remember, just because we’re talking about data-driven email marketing doesn’t mean you should ignore other customer-based metrics within your business. Your email marketing strategy should take into account metrics from every pertinent area: paid advertising, customer retention, average lifetime customer value, etc.
To avoid data silos, teams should have two things:
- A clear and consistent method for tracking email marketing metrics.
- A clear and consistent process for reporting those metrics to all necessary parties.
To better understand data-driven email marketing, let’s discuss…
- Data-Driven Email Marketing Strategies
- Data-Driven Email Marketing Tools