In the last of our 3 part series on setting digital marketing goals, we are discussing goals for email marketing. You may have questioned the role that email marketing plays in digital marketing today, but those questions are ill-founded. Email marketing has an astounding return of investment of $36 for every $1 spent!
Email Marketing Motivation
If that ROI is not enough to motivate you to increase your email marketing efforts take note of these recent statistics from Hubspot:
- Across all industries, the average email open rate is 19.8%, the click-through rate is 11.3%, and the bounce rate is 9.4%.
- Marketers who use segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue.
- 78% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months.
- More than 8 out of 10 people will open a welcome email, generating 4x as many opens and 10x as many clicks as other email types.
- 99% of email users check their inbox every day, with some checking 20 times a day. Of those people, 58% of consumers check their email first thing in the morning.
- Your audience will reward you with higher open and click rates if you don’t send more than five newsletters a week.
So how do you improve your email marketing strategy? The same way you improve anything- evaluate where you are, set goals, make a plan, and implement the plan.
Evaluate Your Current Strategy and Database
The first step in setting digital marketing goals for email marketing is the same step as with any digital marketing goal setting – evaluate your current strategy.
Looking back over the six months to a year prior, how many emails did you send? Were they sent regularly or sporadically? Has your email database grown during that time? Did you employ any strategies to increase your email database? If so, were they successful? What is the open rate for your subscribers? What kind of sales resulted from your email marketing?
Take a long hard look at where you are and what you have done. Then you will know what and where you need to improve.
Examples of Digital Marketing Goals for Email Marketing
- Expand your subscriber list
- Increase your click-through rate (CTR)
- Increase your open rate
- Increase visits to your website via email marketing
- Refresh your email database
- Increase online sales
- Provide quality content
- Improve brand awareness
- Encourage customer loyalty
Create a Plan to Reach Your Goals
Once you have set your goals, it is time to create a plan to reach those goals. KPI’s or Key Performance Indicators will help you in crafting your strategy and seeing the outcome of your efforts.
For example, if your goal includes expanding your subscriber list then you must craft a plan to encourage new subscribers to your emails. This could be a push via social media platforms or a prompt on your website. Brian shared great tips in his blog 3 Tips to Grow Your Email Marketing Database that include utilizing your current clients that may not be subscribed, adding a form on your website, and event registrations.
If your goals include increasing your open rate, CTR, or improving content then you will want to focus on what information you are sharing in your emails. Craft a plan that provides relevant information that your customers are looking for, positions you as an expert, and includes a clear call to action. Improved calls to action will also help if your goal includes increased visits to your website. For inspiration, look at your competitors or successful businesses in a similar industry and see what content strategy they have employed. How can you recreate what they have done but do it better?
It is important to remember when crafting content for your email campaign that you consider what stage in the buyer’s journey your customers are in. Are they researching products to learn what they want? Are they comparing products to make a decision? Or Are they ready to buy and looking for the best place to buy and the best price? All of these answers make creating quality content simpler. We did a deep dive on the buyer’s journey in our blog post Email Marketing and the Buyer’s Journey.
Work Smarter Not Harder
No matter what your digital marketing goals for email marketing are, you want to work smarter and not harder when it comes to automation. At Dogwood we love MailChimp. MailChimp allows you to add tags to your subscriber list to ensure that the right people get the right emails. They allow simple event registrations, trickle email campaigns, and list management (birthday emails!) For more information on how MailChimp can simplify your email marketing check out our blog 3 Life Changing Email Marketing Tips.
If you are just getting started with email marketing for your business or are on the fence about how and why you should, our blog post The What, Why, and How of Email Marketing may simplify things for you!
Dogwood can help you work smarter not harder when it comes to crafting and implementing digital marketing goals for email marketing. Reach out today and let’s get a conversation started.
Be sure to check out the previous two posts in this series on setting digital marketing goals: Digital Marketing Goals for Your Website and Digital Marketing Goals for Social Media.
