Below are some data-driven email marketing strategies to help you get started.
- Choose Your Metrics — The first step to any data-driven email marketing strategy is to choose which metrics you’re going to pay close attention to. The metrics you choose will likely change over time, but don’t worry about that. For now, just choose the metrics that matter most for you and your business. Here are some ideas.
- Deliverability Rate
- Bounce Rate
- Open Rate
- Click-Through Rate
- Conversion Rate
- ROI
- Lifetime Value Per Subscriber
- Revenue Per Subscriber
- Set Benchmarks — Once you know which metrics you want to pay attention to, it’s time to set some benchmarks, some standards, for your specific business and audience. The easiest way to do this is to find the average baselines from your past sending history. If you’re just getting started, then do the best you can and watch your metrics for a few months. Then determine the average for each metric and set that as your benchmark.
- Create Segments — It’s easy to assume that all of your subscribers will want the same treatment; they’re all on the same email list, after all. But that isn’t the case. More than likely, you have a lot of different kinds of people on your email list. You have people who are ready to buy from you, people who just love your content, and even people who barely know what it is that you do. One of the best ways to launch a data-driven email marketing strategy is to create different segments for different types of subscribers and treat each group like they want to be treated. Each segment you create should be based on the data you collect.
- Watch Behavior Anecdotally — One of the best ways to learn about what content, products, and messages really resonate with your existing audience is to pay close attention to the way they interact with your landing pages. How much time do they spend on them? What do they click? Where do they look? While some of this data is hard to quantify or to set benchmarks for, heatmaps, click-maps, and similar behavioral data is remarkably valuable when trying to learn about what your audience loves… and what they don’t.
- A/B Test — A/B testing is the cream of the crop for data-driven email marketers. With it, you can compare the performance of two identical emails, save for the single factor that you’d like to test (subject line, pre-header text, CTA, image, etc). With an A/B test, the emails send at the same time, randomizing the recipients evenly, and you only (should) change a single factor between the emails. This makes A/B testing extremely effective and revealing about the type of content your specific list is most likely to open, read, and click.
- Surveys — Perhaps the easiest way to learn about the people on your list, what they want, who they are, even how they think, is to send out a survey. You can discover lots of hidden demographic nuances of your list which contribute to the effectiveness of the content you create and the emails you send. You might find, for example, that the majority of your list is comprised of middle-aged men. Or you might find that the majority of your list is comprised of single, stay-at-home moms. Whatever you find, that knowledge will help you send more relevant content and create more powerful products for your specific list.
- You can use SurveyMonkey to create and send surveys, and then track the responses of those surveys.
Here’s a great article with additional data-driven email marketing strategies, tips, and tricks: How to Use Data to Drive Your Email Marketing