5 Proven Tactics to Boost Your Email Marketing Returns

How often do people check their emails? 

Research shows that at least 99% of email users check their email every day, some as much as 20 times a day, and 61% of consumers prefer to be contacted by brands through email. If you are investing in email marketing, you want to make sure you are getting the most out of it. While your target customers are almost guaranteed to see your message, getting them to open and engage with it requires careful optimization. Our comprehensive guide walks you through the steps to maximize the return on investment (ROI) of your email campaigns as part of your brand's digital strategy.

Analyzing Your Email Marketing ROI

Quantifying the return on investment is among the most significant challenges for marketers, particularly when it comes to email marketing. Evaluating the returns generated from email campaigns necessitates tracking several key performance indicators (KPIs). However, how can you begin the journey of optimizing your return on investment from email marketing?

To start, the potential return on investment of email marketing should not be underestimated. According to specialists, businesses can expect an average return of $40 to $45 for each dollar spent on email marketing. Furthermore, when compared to other marketing channels, email marketing outperforms the rest. Specifically, search engine optimization (SEO) and keyword ads generate returns of $22.24 and $17, respectively. With a significantly lower budget, email marketing produces a return on investment of 4,000% or more.

Furthermore, these impressive figures do not represent the upper limit of return on investment you could attain. Some organizations have achieved a return on investment that is nearly twice the average for every dollar spent. Imagine the possibilities of doubling your return on investment from email marketing alone, effectively doubling your impact across your KPIs such as customer conversions and lead acquisition.

5 Ways to Optimize Your Email Marketing for Maximum ROI

For optimal return on investment in email marketing, here are some strategies you can adopt to help deliver relevant content, stimulate engagement, and drive conversions:

Segment Your Audience

To optimize your email return on investment, you must prioritize the segmentation of your audience. Your email list can include people from a wide range of demographics, even if your company has a specific customer profile. Since each person has unique needs, interests, wants, and behaviors, grouping your email list based on a specific qualifying criterion is crucial. This ensures that you provide relevant and valuable content to each audience segment.

Audience segmentation is crucial for maximizing the return on investment of your email marketing efforts. Studies have revealed that segmenting your campaigns can generate 14.31% more opens, in addition to higher click-through rates and fewer unsubscribes. Creating segments based on demographics, like location, age, industry, or personal interests, and customer feedback can help align your content with the audience's criteria. 

Organizing your email list based on the marketing funnel stage of leads enables you to send personalized messages that resonate with each user and encourage them to progress to the next step. On the Growlytics marketing automation platform, you can create dynamic segments based on the customer behavior data collected by the Growlytics marketing automation platform. For instance, you can send informative newsletters to those in the awareness stage and exclusive deals to those in the purchase stage.

​​Personalization

Combining segmentation and personalization can help you get the most out of your email marketing return on investment. As open and click-through rates are important KPIs for email campaigns, personalization plays a critical role in engaging your audience. On average, personalized emails have a 26% higher open rate than generic messages and lead to a six-fold increase in the average transaction rate.

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The Growlytics marketing automation platform helps you take personalization to the next level. You can utilize the information gathered by Growlytics about your subscribers' demographics, interests, and previous engagement and behavior. By simply including the recipient's name in the subject line, you can enhance engagement and guarantee that your emails are actually opened. 

Personalizing the content based on these specifics fosters a bond with your audience and elevates the chances of them continuing to engage with your emails.

A/B Testing

A/B or split testing experiments on the Growlytics marketing automation platform, allow you to test various variables to determine which is the most effective at motivating your audience to achieve a goal. Your recipients see two or more versions of your email, allowing you to experiment with different subject lines, specific content for certain groups, and even the "To" and "From" fields. Subsequently, your analysis will reveal which variation generates the most conversions. As you experiment with different email components, you'll discover the ones that work best at increasing engagement and maximizing your email marketing return on investment.

Let's say you want to determine which headline performs better: discount or letting them know you’ve saved their cart. You can achieve this by dividing a test group of subscribers into two - Group A and Group B. Group A receives emails with a 10% discount in the headline, while Group B receives emails with a ‘We’ve saved your cart’ message in the headline. Once you gather data about your audience's engagement, you can ascertain which email format garners the most interactions. Utilizing this information, you can incorporate the winning element and enhance your approaches for future campaigns.

Automation

The adage "time is money" applies to the world of business, and marketing automation is an excellent way to save both. The Growlytics marketing automation platform can help maximize your return on investment by automating some of the most intricate tasks. As a result, email marketing becomes easier, more efficient, and much more measurable than manual methods.

While it's common knowledge that an automated marketing platform like Growytics can handle your email campaigns, its capabilities go far beyond that. For instance, it offers A/B testing as an automated feature, where the platform not only splits the groups for you but also tracks and evaluates the outcomes.

With the help of the Growlytics marketing automation platform, you can identify leads and automatically add them to your lists. As soon as someone signs up, they become a part of your subscriber list and receive marketing emails from your brand. This allows you to avoid the hassle of manually nurturing leads and simultaneously expanding your potential customer base. Therefore, don't underestimate the potential of marketing automation, as it may have additional automation features that can elevate your return on investment.

Mobile Responsive Design

In today's world, a significant percentage of email subscribers access their emails through mobile devices, generating 41% of email views, with desktop usage slightly lower at 39%. Therefore, having a mobile responsive design is crucial in maximizing the ROI of email marketing.

To effectively optimize for mobile, place emphasis on plain text and divide paragraphs into smaller sections to ensure that the content fits properly on a small screen. Keep your emails short since research has demonstrated that emails containing 50 to 150 words have the highest engagement rates. Remember that quality is more important than quantity. With the Growlytics Drag-and-Drop editor, you can not only pay attention to these details but you can also make your emails device responsive. 

Pro Tip: Lower-resolution images are recommended for email content. The Growlytics marketing automation platform typically compresses images, enabling you to use high-quality graphics to enrich your email content. With the most common mobile screen resolution being 360 pixels by 640 pixels, it is crucial to ensure that any images in your emails remain clear and well-defined at these resolutions.

Evaluating Email Delivery Performance

The success or failure of email deliverability can hinge on whether your messages are delivered to your audience's inboxes. Although it may seem like the most basic aspect of email marketing, deliverability is surprisingly intricate. If your return on investment is disappointing, it may be due to your emails failing to reach their intended recipients. There are numerous factors that can affect your email deliverability, most of which are related to your sender reputation.

An inadequate sender reputation indicates to email providers that your messages are inferior in quality and not deserving of engagement. The most unfavorable outcome is that your emails may end up in your audience's spam folders, increasing your spam rate and causing your sender reputation to deteriorate even further. It's an endless cycle. While being marked as spam plays a significant part in determining your sender reputation, there are other factors that can influence this metric and your email deliverability in general.

When you send unsegmented campaigns, individuals may receive unwanted or irrelevant emails, which can result in a higher probability of them flagging your messages as spam. A poor sender reputation may also be due to your content not being compelling enough to encourage recipients to open and click through your emails. Despite this reason, a low sender reputation can lead to decreased email deliverability and a lower email marketing ROI for your business. Therefore, you should focus on metrics that measure email deliverability, such as your spam rate, hard bounce rate, and soft bounce rate, to mitigate these risks.

Performance Analytics and Reporting

Monitoring your email analytics through reporting tools can be overwhelming, but it's necessary to optimize your email marketing return on investment. In reality, only a third of marketers accurately track and measure the return on investment of each of their marketing channels. However, analyzing your data is vital in understanding which KPIs your campaigns are meeting and discovering ways to enhance your campaigns based on this information.

To measure the effectiveness of email marketing, you must monitor key performance indicators such as engagement metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. Return on investment calculation in email marketing should be based on revenue and sales. While sending a large volume of emails is good, it is essential to determine whether customers are engaging with your brand's emails. After all, audience engagement is crucial for generating conversions.

The Growlytics marketing automation platform offers data analytics features, which you can leverage to optimize your campaigns. Monitor revenue per email to evaluate the effectiveness of specific messaging or track click-through rates for certain promo links to gauge the effectiveness of certain call-to-actions (CTAs). Ultimately, your return on investment measures the amount of money generated by your emails. Without proper measurement, you won't be able to refine your strategies for future campaigns.

The key to maximizing the return on investment of email marketing is to understand your campaigns. Effective measurement, optimization, and targeting are the most effective ways to achieve the full potential of email marketing. Adapting your strategy to your brand's target audience, offering them valuable, engaging content, and comprehending how they interact with it can help your team plan more effective strategies for boosting the ROI of your email marketing.

Sign up here for a quick demo with Growlytics and get started with optimizing your email marketing for maximum return on your investment.

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