As an email marketer, you know that your success depends on building a healthy, responsive list. The more subscribers you gain, the better your chances of sending successful campaigns and generating revenue. While there are many ways to build your list and send effective campaigns, there’s one element that ties them all together: tracking your results. You can’t improve what you don’t measure, so measuring campaign performance is crucial for tracking growth over time and making decisions about future efforts. In this post, we’ll walk you through how to track results across all stages of the lifecycle of an email marketing campaign — from building your list to sending effective campaigns.
Creating a campaign
The first step is to choose a template from the dropdown menu in your email marketing software. You can select from pre-existing templates or create your own custom template. If you opt for the latter, make sure that it matches your brand’s design and messaging to stay consistent with the rest of your company’s marketing materials. Once you’ve selected a template, click “Next.”
Next up is adding a subject line and body text for your email campaign:
- In the Subject Line field, write out what you want people to think about when they receive this email (e.g., “New Product Launch”).
- In the Body Text field, write out why this particular offer is good news for them (e.g., “We’ve just launched our newest product”).
Once you’ve filled out the subject line and body text, click “Next” again. Next, you’ll need to add recipients to your email campaign. You can import them from an existing list on your email marketing software. Or you can send invites to people who’ve signed up for your newsletter but haven’t yet confirmed their email address (this is known as a double opt-in).
Uploading your list
You can also import your list from a spreadsheet, Google Docs, or Excel. Follow these general steps to import your list from a spreadsheet using email marketing software:
- Click the [Import] icon in your campaign builder,
- Choose “Import New Contacts” to begin importing contacts. You’ll be taken to the Import Contacts Page where you can either select an existing CSV file or upload one directly from your computer (if it’s not already there).
Notes:
If your CSV file contains different information to define various subscriber segments, e.g., who have purchased but not unsubscribed, make sure each column has its own field name so that the email campaign builder can distinguish them when importing.
After you’ve finished importing your contacts, click the [Save] button to save your changes. If you have any questions about this process, please feel free to contact the email service provider for assistance.
Before sending emails, use the email verification tool to verify the email addresses. It will reduce bounce rates and save you from getting penalized.
Customizing your signup forms
Customizing your signup forms can be as easy as adding a few fields to the form you’re using to collect email addresses.
It’s important to have a signup form in place because it allows you to capture the contact information of people who are interested in receiving updates from you or reading more about what you do.
Customized sign-up forms are a great way to get the most out of your leads. They let you ask the right questions at the right time so that you can convert more people into buyers and clients.
There are two main reasons why customized forms are so important:
- Customized forms help you get quality leads. They help you understand your leads by asking for the information that only matters most at each stage of the buying process.
- Customized sign-up forms better the chances of conversion.
If you set up your own HTML page with a signup form on it, be sure to use an email marketing tool like BayEngage or Mailchimp or any other MailChimp alternative. Thus, you can automatically add these new leads into the system for follow-up campaigns and drip campaigns (more on those later).
Here are some tips to create sign-up forms that improve conversion:
- Keep it simple and direct,
- Use a direct CTA button that clearly tells what action you want the website visitor to take,
- Use a column sign-up form as a two-column sign-up form can confuse people,
- Show social media proof,
- Inform them what happens after they sign up,
- Remove unnecessary distractions from the page like ads, photos, or videos,
- Consider using conversion-optimized landing pages,
- Don’t ask for the same information twice,
- Implement an inline form validation to collect only valid email addresses or phone numbers,
- Use CAPTCHA to decrease spam or bot influence.
Send highly targeted emails to your audience
When it comes to email marketing, one of the most critical things is tracking. You can’t improve what you don’t measure. By using the right software, you’ll be able to segment everything about the audience from their interests, region, gender, and more. Segmenting can only be done when you have built a solid email list and it doesn’t build overnight.
Besides, you can get valuable insights about your audience to refine your campaigns accordingly. This is crucial for improving future campaigns to meet your goals!
One of the most important things you can do as a business owner is to learn how to market your products and services effectively. Email marketing is one of the best ways to reach your audience and generate sales—but it takes a lot of time, effort, and patience!
The key is to start small and build up your email list over time. Once you’ve got that foundation set, it’s time to start sending out emails with offers and promotions on a regular basis.
Setting up tracking and analytics
Once you have your email campaign live, it’s time to track its performance. Tracking tools help calculate the open rate, how many people read your emails, and whether they make a purchase.
Setting up tracking is relatively easy. There are numerous options available that are often included in your email service provider (ESP). To start tracking:
- Sign up for a web analytics account like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics. Use this to track website traffic and collect user behavior data so you know what works best within an email campaign. They also provide you with key metrics such as bounce rate, engagement rate, and conversion rate which will be helpful when reviewing results from different campaigns.
- Some services like BayEngage can centralize all data in one place which makes it easier for you to control your data and avoid duplication.
Sending your first email
Once you’ve set up tracking, it’s time to send your first email. Test different emails in small batches to see what works best for your audience and brand.
The first one should be a welcome email to introduce your brand and offer an incentive for your subscribers. This is important because it gives you an idea of how many people are actually opening and engaging with your emails and what kind of content they like.
If you want to try a different kind of content to see which brings the best results, remember to include A/B testing. A/B testing allows you to send different email versions to different audience segments to see which version performs better. This helps you find out what type of content works best for each segment and how often they respond to certain types of emails. With this data, you can create a more effective email strategy to boost your open rate.
Conclusion
One of the most important things to remember is that you are building a relationship, not just sending emails. The more personal your messages are, the better. You should also keep track of your contacts’ interests and preferences for analysis so that you can send them the content they love to read. All of these might sound overwhelming and seem to require a lot of work. But your effort will pay off in the long run!
Still, if you don’t have time to run email campaigns, you can get help from an email marketing agency. Email marketing agencies usually have a team of experts that can help you with anything from scratch!
