The average ROI on email marketing is impressive with $44 return on every $1 spent, but what if you could improve your ROI even further?
Fortunately, there are some advanced marketing methods that marketers can use to track and improve ROI from email. Most of these tools rely on email marketing automation to leverage data and personalize emails in constructive, timely, and relevant ways.
When you combine personalization with email marketing automation, you take email campaigns to new heights. Subscribers are more likely to open, click, and convert as a result of receiving messages that are tailored to their interests and values.
You don’t have to take our word for it. There are dozens of studies that show how effective personalization and email marketing automation can be. Here are a few email statistics to consider:
- Over 75% of email revenue is generated by triggered, personal campaigns, rather than one-size-fits-all campaigns (DMA).
- Automated email campaigns account for 21% of email marketing revenue (DMA).
- Automated email messages average 70.5% higher open rates and 152% higher click-through rates than “business as usual” marketing messages (Epsilon).
- Companies who send automated emails are 133% more likely to send relevant messages that correspond to a customer’s purchase cycle (Lenskold and Pedowitz Groups).
To help advanced marketers amp up their ROI using email marketing automation and personalization, we’re sharing four advanced tools.
1. Track customer behaviors with a website tracking snippet
When you send an email, you want the ability to track a subscriber’s movement from the moment they open your email to the time they make a purchase on your website. With a website tracking snippet, you can.
By using a website tracking snippet, you can monitor KPIs through tools like Google Analytics. These snippets break down a customer’s website activity into helpful data such as click-through rates, bounces, conversions, and first-time visitors. You can also collect valuable customer information, including the location of a subscriber.
Using this information, you can fine-tune your segments for improved personalization. The data collected goes beyond basic demographic information that you may already have and provides a more in-depth look at your customer base.
You’ll need to add a little code to your website so you can gather this information, but we have a step-by-step guide to help you through the setup process.
By understanding how customers interact with your email and website, you can create segments of customers based on the data. Turbo-charging your segments allows you to send subscribers the right message at the right time, and drive more revenue as a result.
2. Get advanced insights with behavioral segment builder
Another tool that neatly complements the website tracking snippet is the behavioral segment builder. This tool gives marketers the ability to create advanced, micro-segments that are based on a subscriber’s actual behavior. For instance, you can create a segment of subscribers who purchased a certain product from your website or reached a certain level on your gaming app.
You can mine this data to create even more specific segments. For example, you can create a segment based on a specific activity that happened at a certain time. Let’s say you want to send an email to subscribers who purchased a specific product from your website in the last two months; with a behavioral segment builder, you can.
Go beyond basic segments and drill down to specific behaviors exhibited by specific customers, and send them a targeted message based on their activity. It doesn’t get much more personal than that.
3. Segment-triggered automation to narrow audience
Not only can you build customer-specific segments to improve ROI, but you can also send emails to those niche audiences through email marketing automation.
By using segment-triggered automation, or automated journeys, you can create a series of emails that are sent to subscribers based on triggered events, dates, or subscriber activity.
If a subscriber joins your email list in-store, for example, this event could trigger a welcome email. But maybe you don’t want to send a one-size-fits-all email to every new subscriber. Let’s say you want to send a different email to VIP customers. You can create an automated journey to make this a reality. Here’s what it looks like:
Email marketing automation gives marketers more control over emails sent and saves a ton of time because the entire process is automated. In other words, once the customer journey is set up, it works on autopilot. You don’t have to go into your account and manually send emails; once the customer joins the list it triggers the email automatically.
You can send emails automatically based on different triggers too. Send an email on a certain date or when a subscriber joins a new segment, for example.
It’s all about creating a more personalized journey that keeps customer satisfaction — and ROI — high.
4. Deliver personalized messages with dynamic content
Creating individual messages for segments is effective, but time-consuming. You want to boost ROI from personalization, but for some, the time commitment is a problem. Enter dynamic content.
With dynamic content, you create one email and customize a piece of the email to fit each subscriber you’re sending it to.
For example, when Adidas introduced customers to its new celebrity clothing line, they used dynamic content to show women styles created by female pop star Rita Ora, while men got to see clothes designed by male vocalist Pharrell Williams. The images of the email dynamically changed depending on a subscriber’s gender.
Women saw these styles in the email:
Men saw these styles in the email:
Dynamic content gives marketers a way to tailor an email, which increases the likelihood of customers shopping because the email is relevant.
Wrap up
Marketers are often asked to justify their budget, and sometimes it’s hard to know which marketing tactics provide the best ROI. However, email marketing is one of few methods that have KPIs that you can use to see how effective your email marketing is.
When you combine these advanced techniques listed above and the email marketing automation that accompanies them, you can improve your ROI even more.
To see these tools in action, request a demo of Campaign Monitor.