4 Steps to Better E-mail Marketing Results

The interactive revolution has brought many incredible advances, not least is the ability to track e-mail respondents. The results are right there, within days after your campaign has been deployed. These real-time reports allow you to accurately measure the effectiveness of every campaign you send. You can:

• Find out how many recipients opened your e-mail, clicked a link, unsubscribed, forwarded your e-mail to a friend, and more. Find out exactly who is checking out your e-mail, how many times they’re doing it, and when they did it. Get an overview for the life of the campaign or drill down all the way to minute-by-minute detail.
• See what your subscribers are interested in. Not only can you see the total number of clicks for every link in your e-mail, but you can also find out who clicked that link, when they clicked it and how many times. By including a forward to a friend link in your campaign, you can easily see which subscribers are forwarding your e-mail and how many people they’re forwarding to.
• Compare multiple campaigns. Statistics like open and click rates are useful for each campaign, but it’s when you start comparing results over time that the data really shines. By easily comparing stats like opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes and even spam complaints, you can quickly see what content your subscribers find relevant, and just as importantly, what they don’t.

In short, there’s information galore information that has never been available until now, when a single click can provide insight into the habits, interest and intent of an e-mail recipient.

While all this added insight is interesting, the important part is how you can best make use of that information, to turn marketing knowledge into potential sales. Increased sales results will start when you include these four key steps in your next e-mail effort:

• Step #1: Track
• Step #2: Segment
• Step #3: Analyze
• Step #4: Re-market

Re-marketing can include any number of follow-up tactics: if the volume is huge, send another e-mail customized to a specific interest as demonstrated by click-through results; if the volume is more manageable, get the sales force following up those same respondents one-on-one. You get the picture the tactics are endless.

Using e-mail marketing knowledge is more powerful than ever. Put that knowledge to work and laser focus your re-marketing efforts to generate sales.