The best way to improve your email marketing efforts is to benchmark your campaigns and figuring out what works best. Most email marketing solutions will give you tools to help you improve your campaign. These tools range from giving your campaign analytics, to split-testing your campaigns. Here’s some things to consider when benchmarking email marketing campaigns.
Split-Test Your Campaigns
Pretty much every email marketing platform will give you the ability to split-test your email marketing campaigns. Split testing means that you’re able to send two or more versions of a campaign to a sample group from your email list. This allows you to analyze the results and see which versions perform better. You’re then able to send the optimal version to the rest of your list.
Using Web-Based Analytics To Benchmark Campaigns
Benchmarking opens and clicks is one thing, but it’s the conversions that really matter. Sometimes conversions can’t be measured through the email marketing analytics. If your purchases take place on line, it’s important to use your web analytics to benchmark the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. Google Analytics, and most other analytical suites will allow you to setup conversion rules. This makes it simple and easy to measure the number of conversions from the different traffic sources. Many email marketing platforms will even let you setup Google Analytics campaign tagging directly from the email marketing suite.
The more robust email marketing (marketing automation) will include their own analytical tracking codes. Adding these to your website can provide a better insight into how your email recipients are interacting with your website. It’ll also allow you to score leads based on website interaction, as well as trigger campaign automations through website interactions.
Some Of The Different Things To Benchmark / Split-Test:
Looking for some of the things you might be able to test? There’s tons of different experiments you can perform to improve your email marketing campaigns. Please keep in mind that this isn’t a complete list, and some testing criteria might even be unique to your particular industry. By any means, never stop testing and always brainstorm the different things you’ve never tested before.
Time Of The Day
The send time is incredibly important. So important, that some marketing automation suites have developed features to send individual emails in the campaigns at different times, based on the recipients email opening habits. Even if your email marketing suite doesn’t have these features, you can still test this. Split test your list with different send times to see if there’s a noticeable result.
Day Of The Week
The day of the week is another thing that can be split test. This is especially true for weekend campaigns vs Friday or weekday campaigns. Some email marketing campaigns might perform better during weekdays or normal business hours. Others might perform better over the weekend.
From Sender Name
Test the from sender name. This can be testing the different names of the people in your organization, as well as testing a name vs the company name or anything in between.
Email Design
Test different versions of the same email newsletter. Different designs can impact how the user engages and interacts with the campaign. Test the different versions for clicks, forwards, conversions or any other metrics you can get your hands on.
Send Frequency
Do you email marketing campaigns perform better when you’re sending a larger volume or a smaller volume? Some companies can get away with a lot more frequent sending. Some companies even send daily. Daily digests, for example. Play around with different monthly sending frequency to see if there’s a noticeable difference in overall email marketing effectiveness.
Offer / Call-To-Action
If you’re trying to sell something, there should always be an offer or call to action within your email message. What the offer or other call-to-action might be will definitely differ from organization to organization. Testing different coupon offers, languages in the offers or call-to-action or testing different products and services are all examples on how you can split test email marketing offers.