If you’re being challenged to justify your marketing budget, you are not alone. The pressure is on to prove your teams’ value. Is your content on message? Is it getting to the right inboxes? Is it improving over time? Knowing these answers is the start to understanding your email marketing return on investment (ROI).
Get started by organizing your data and translating it into meaningful customer insights for your team and other stakeholders. Let’s begin with simple steps to enhance your email marketing lists and collect meaningful data.
Email data helps you understand your ideal customer, so make sure your lists are tidy.
Step 1 – Clean Your Email Lists Regularly
When you send emails to old addresses or ones that have been hard bounced, opted out, or marked your message as spam, you are risking your reputation to customers and within your email platform. Email providers are monitoring your emails. If customers do not engage, your messages may be categorized as spam and never hit customer inboxes.
Cleaning your list every six months is vital. Here are the steps:
- Collect your list of opt outs, hard bounces, and spam complaints.
- Ask your sales team to review the lists to identify any red alerts. Red alerts are important customers who are opting out or email addresses that are obviously wrong.
- Update the addresses you can and delete the rest from the list.
Once you put these practices in action, you will see improvements in your deliverability scores. You may also find an opportunity to save money on the cost of your email platform if you have fewer contacts to email. This is an example where the quality of your contacts is more important than the quantity.
Step 2 – Segment Your Lists
Segments are branch lists that pull contacts from the master client list that meet certain categories. The categories could range from past behavior, job titles, or locations to customer onboarding timelines.
If you have ever received a promotional email that was not in your realm of work, then you may have experienced the results of skipping this step. The sender probably didn’t use segmented lists and instead sent the email to one main list.
Contacts that fall into specific categories will be more apt to engage with your message if they receive content that speaks directly to them. If you don’t use segmented lists, you are risking having your good, reputable contacts opt out.
Let us take care of this for you.
Knowing your ideal customers from top to bottom all starts with making sure you take care of your data and organize it for the best results. Planning your email strategy, benchmarks, and analyzing results regularly can be time-consuming and challenging. If you just don’t have time for that, Moxie is here for you. Contact Michele Jensen at michele.jensen@experiencemoxie.com.
