The other side of ROI for email marketing

 

Everyone is always talking about ROI, how to increase it, how to keep it, and is it enough.  ROI, known as return on investment is a mathematical formula that calculates a ratio between net income and investment. 

Simply put, ROI is used to gauge the effectiveness of an investment. Business owners do this all the time, whether or not they are aware of it; when making advertising and marketing decisions.  Questions such as which advertising platform will give the best bang for the buck, to what ad should run, when, and where.

Business owners, however, may not be aware of which digital marketing platform works the best for their industry. Regardless if you use one or many social media platforms, the best bang for your buck remains – email marketing. In fact according to research by Emarketer  “the median email marketing ROI is 122% , or four times higher than any other digital marketing channel.”

As a business owner using email marketing, how do you measure your ROI?

Some companies struggle to measure their email marketing efforts because they may not know which factors affect ROI.  So we suggest you look beyond measurements, the other side of ROI,  and consider the following:

The Software:

Email marketing has the power to provide any business of any size with an attractive return on investment. Using an Email Service Provider (ESP) the marketer can typically send volumes of email to list subscribers, using a web-based application or if they use Dundee Internet email services, customers can use also use their email client.

Unlike sending bulk email with an email client such as Outlook or logging into a Gmail account, ESP tools normally include managing subscriber lists, designing email campaigns, scheduling autoresponders, and reviewing sender statistics. With an ESP, sent email does not include all the addresses of other recipients of the message for everyone to see. The user must select Blind Copy to hide the individual email address.

Overall ESPs use software designed to send effective high impact campaigns that naturally move sending results to a higher ROI.

The influencer’s:

Use demographic, behavioral, and other information/data, for example, repeat purchases to create relevant messages. By using these profile preferences you as the marketer, demonstrate you know and understand the needs and interest of your subscriber. The more you use relevant, personalized content in your messages the better your email will perform.

Other ways to increase your ROI, add some pizzazz with an animated gif, images, and always great content.

Being personal:

Personalization is the key that bridges good relevant content to reader interest. Personalization is recognized as the vehicle that strengthens engagement that fuels conversions. It has been shown that marketers using personalization have a substantial increase in their ROI compared to others who do not use personalization 

Running Tests:

Testing your marketing email will give you a better understanding of the potential success of a campaign. There are several kinds of testing, including A/B testing: a method of comparing different versions of the parts of an email against each other to determine which one performs better. 

You can test the presentation including the rendering and functionality or your emails in different email clients to verify everything looks good and works as expected.

There is also testing deliverability against Spam Filters. These tests will give a good indication of how a typical SPAM filter will handle your email: pass or play. Testing Spam filter for email deliverability is essential. After all, if emails can’t reach your subscribers, you’ll never see engagement. Good email deliverability will guarantee that your email marketing ROI moves in the right direction.

The Analytics:

The tools an ESP provides allow you to see what works and what doesn’t work with your email campagins. When you analyze the results of your email campaign the overall ROI will increase because you have more data to work with, enabling you to make improvements as needed.

Policies:

Email policies are changing. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR); it’s all about the protection of the privacy rights of EU individuals. Even though this is enacted in Europe it requires significant changes by organizations worldwide.

Around the same time California enacted the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA)   gives consumers more control over the personal information that businesses collect about them.  And there’s the upcoming Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act (CDPA).

And we still have the CanSpam Act.

These policies play a part in your ROI.  Review and execute as needed.

All these suggestions are the other side of ROI, which are beyond measurements, come together resulting in higher ROI results. Management tools, such as segmentation, contact forms, real-time data, transactional messaging guarantees a great return on investment.