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How To Measure Your Email Marketing Success For Your Business

 
Although social media is the most buzzed about marketing platform, email is still the most useful channel for small businesses that are looking to connect with consumers. Email still generates a higher ROI than social media and is nearly 40 percent more effective at customer acquisition. However, to get optimum results, owners need to understand how to effectively measure and manage their email marketing campaigns.

 

 
Monitor your open and click through rates

One critical metric for measuring the success of an email campaign is its open rate. As this Super Office article notes, getting your company's message into consumers' inboxes is only half the battle. Customers need to open your emails and click through to your website in order to have the desired effect. Knowing what percentage of your email recipients are actually responding to your campaign is essential to its success. Having that intel will allow you to tweak the keywords, and call out the language and personalization level of your messages so that they resonate with the target demographics.

 
Clean your list

To get an accurate picture of how successful your current email campaign is, you need to have an accurate list of email recipients. This means regularly purging your list of fake email addresses, subscribers who marked your emails as spam and those who have never opened a single message you've sent out. As this Forbes piece points out, having phantom subscribers in your database can skew your data in ways that will dilute the impact of your campaign. A quality email marketing tool will make pruning your list a cinch so that you can get the accurate reporting you need to succeed.

 
Segment and refine

Once you've ascertained that your message is going to actual consumers and they are taking the time to read your emails, you need to refine your timing and messaging. Using your open rate, you can get a good idea of when it's time to send out email blasts to your consumer base. Notifying consumers about a sale they might be interested in at the wrong time can prove to be incredibly costly. Also, it's important to segment your list into groups based on their previous ordering habits. Doing so will allow you to maximize your campaign efficiency by alerting consumers who've made purchases within a particular category when desired sales and new product launches are happening. It's much easier to sell customers something they want rather than something they don't.

 

 

This article was written by Mario McKellop for CBS Small Business Pulse.
 

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