CONDUCTING AN EMAIL MARKETING REVIEW

Here's a wealth of hints, tricks and suggestions on how to increase the effectiveness of your email marketing programs. Before you start, however, it might make sense to get a good picture of where your campaigns are today by conducting an email marketing review. This review should include an analysis of key performance metrics, a look at any recipient feedback or surveys, a review of your website analytics, a comparison against internal and relevant external benchmarks and a review of your creative and content.

Once this is complete, you can use what you’ve learned to map out an improvement plan for your email marketing programs using the information in the guide. The steps for an Email Marketing Review are listed below.

Analysis of Key Performance Metrics

Your first step in the Email Marketing Review process is to develop a spreadsheet that contains your email marketing program results from the past 6 -12 months. The idea is to give yourself a broad enough sample size to extract meaningful information and to conduct deep analysis as easily as possible. Once this report is developed you should be able to calculate your overall averages and determine the best and worst performing message for each metric. Read More

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How do you interpret your results? What metrics are available and which are the best metrics to determine success? The
following is a list of the basics, their priority, how to read them and how to use them to refine content:

Open Rate

This metric indicates how often a recipient opened your email. Since so many emails go ignored, it’s good to know how many got subscribers› attention. However, don’t be misled into believing that every opened email was actually read and digested – in some cases, email is scanned and dumped, opened by mistake or only opened to find the unsubscribe link. Open rate is not the best indicator of email success; however, it can be a great pre-response indicator and also a great way to get results on content or subject line testing.

Click-Through Rate

This is a metric that lets you know how often a recipient clicked on a specific link in your email to either go to your website or to take another action. Again, it’s a pre-response indicator, but it can let you know what content and actions in your email are the most attractive to the reader and give you a good idea of what part of the email was of most interest. Be sure and look at each link separately to determine the winners. Also look at the comparison of click-through to conversion or response. Did people click on your email links (showing interest) and lose it when  they got to the response area? This could be an indication that your response form either asks for too much information, the offer doesn’t pay off as promised in your email or that somehow you lost the reader’s interest.

Conversion or Response Rate

This is absolutely the most important metric. All email has a call-to-action, and this metric answers the question, “Did recipients convert to the action you wanted them to take?” Did they sign up for a subscription? Make a purchase? For most email marketers, the question about whether or not someone bought is the most important metric of all.

Unsubscribes and Spam Complaints

The unsubscribe metric is becoming less important over time. Since consumers are getting so overwhelmed with email, many don’t even take the time to unsubscribe or report email as spam. So in most cases, you’ll find that those people not interested will simply delete your email without reading it. But watch this metric for spikes that could indicate that your content is off base. And any spikes in spam complaints can adversely affect your deliverability so it’s important that you pay attention and take action to avoid this.

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Google for Small Business

Google is the market leader in online search and is becoming the market leader in FREE tools for small business. Watch the presentation on how to get started with Google.

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Starting an eCommerce business is becoming easier by the day. More business owners are looking to expand their online efforts to include eCommerce and build a true online business. Unfortunately, this presents a large set of challenges, not least of which is the threat of larger, better funded competitors online.

Thankfully, the key to successful eCommerce isn’t complicated. By planning ahead and considering your goals and your audience you will greatly increase your chances of success. Here’s three simple ways to make your online shop stand out from the crowd.

Step 1) Focus on Your Best Products

Selling your entire inventory online is unnecessary and often a mistake. Instead, sell a small sub-set of your products that you think may sell well online. For each product, provide a high level of detail describing the product. Follow up with some solid advice on how to choose the correct product for you, or provide expertise and background on the origins of the product.

This way, instead of building an impersonal warehouse-style shop online, you’re providing more of a boutique, - a personal experience that actually engages the customer and answers more of their questions than other shops do. Think of a supermarket versus a boutique fashion store - one simply fulfills their function, the other assists you to make the right buying choice with passion, knowledge and a personal connection.

Make a conscious decision to be the boutique; supermarket-style online stores are everywhere. Most products can already be found online, but there’s often a lack of detail and advice regarding the product. This can become an important and trust-building point of differentiation between you and your competitors.

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This is the first Post for The eCommerce Blog from Sales and Marketing Automation. 

Our mission with this blog is to promote eCommerce Best Practices to Small business owners. We will be including topics that relate to building eCommerce Sites, marketing eCommerce Sites and managing eCommerce Sites.

We are not sure where this journey will take us but the general direction we are going to set out on is to expose the tricks that make successful sites sell.

We will discuss topics like eCommerce Technology, SAAS, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Blogging, Content, Conversion, Customer Automation, and more.

I will be the main contributor to the blog postings, and all of our contributors will some how be related to BigTurns Business Systems, an eCommerce Consulting Company with an eCommerce Platform for sale and a team of eCommerce Consultants.

I Hope you like it.  Read More

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