When it comes to marketing, regardless of whether it’s digital or traditional, the main goal is to maximize the return on your business investment, especially when you are a small business. Understanding ROI in your small business can indeed make a huge difference between success and failure. ROI is often a tool that helps small business owners measure their progress against predetermined goals as well.
There is no denying the fact that email marketing is an incredibly powerful tool. The average ROI for email marketing campaigns is $37 per each $1 spent, while the successful campaigns report an ROI of 42:1. However, like any other tool, email marketing ROI works well only when handled skilfully.
So, if you are new to the email marketing arena, here is a cheat sheet to help you out with buzzwords, acronyms, and most of all – ways to maximize ROI.
Everything’s About the ROI
If you are just getting started with trying to calculate email marketing ROI, you might be vaguely guessing that ROI means something similar to earning as much money as possible through the marketing campaigns you run.
Though it is technically correct, in order to put together a concrete definition, we could say that ROI is the income generated through all forms of marketing you use in your business.
One way to calculate email marketing ROI would be to use this formula: “ROI = (Income – Cost) / Cost”.
Nevertheless, even if your focus is on how ROI is measured, it is important that you learn how to effectively maximize your ROI. And, in order to do so, the basic knowledge about this calculation is all you require.
Social Media Marketing Vs. Email Marketing
Though social media marketing is presently on trend as well, when compared to email marketing, email marketing is reported to continuously secure higher ROI in the past several years.
Email marketing is a great tool and comes with so many benefits which make it hard to not use it for your marketing campaigns. When you are a small business there are time and budget constraints which can prove to be a hurdle when you want to reach out to your target audience.
Designing a quality email marketing campaign isn’t time-consuming, and complicated if you have access to the right talents. Additionally, emails can be sent to a large number of people cost-efficiently and you get direct access to your potential customers’ inboxes.
Furthermore, there definitely are ways to make sure you are doing email marketing efficiently and effectively. It can be by automating as much as possible, or by performing A/B tests.
No matter which option you choose, here are some of our pro tips to maximize your email marketing ROI in 2019.
1. Automate As Much As Possible
Anyone who runs a small business would be familiar with the extreme loads of hard work that goes into making your venture a success. Keep aside your job title, and business missions, there comes circumstances when you have to wear too many hats such as strategy, management, recruitment, and analytics.
The one rule to reaching the ROI you want from email marketing is by automating every process you possibly can alongside optimizing the activities on the go. Automation has massively helped small businesses maximize the ROI from email marketing campaigns. Thus, the key to optimization is that you use as many automated tools as you can in order to complete a list of value-adding tasks as listed below.
Furthermore, creating email marketing automation workflows helps take your contacts with the flow. You can set up different types of email workflows using marketing automation software. For instance, topic workflows are triggered by page views and content offer downloads, whereas blog subscriber welcome workflows are triggered by subscription to your blog.
Similarly, there are a lot more email workflows such as new customer welcome workflow, engagement contact workflow, lead nurturing workflow, and more you could create based on your requirements.
Complex Email Workflows
More than delivering emails, email marketing is about reaching higher open and conversion rates. Building an intricate email based workflow will help with delivering valuable messages to each subscriber.
Furthermore, when using a pre-set workflow on your email marketing software, the onsite triggers automatically direct your customers from the awareness to the conversion and retention stages.
A simple way to make this process more lucrative would be to segment your contact list so that each subscriber is sent on their own customized journey.
Autoresponder Emails
Autoresponder tools are great at making sure that your small business builds strong relationships with your subscribers and customers. Customer relationships and trust are two factors that could make or break a small business. Thus, by delivering direct emails, it triggers their actions and behaviour thereby ensuring your email marketing campaigns run more efficiently.
Dynamic Segmentation
To be honest, not every one of your subscribers is keen to receive the same message from your brand. Irrespective of the products and services that you offer, each of your customers expects to see something personalized slide into their inbox every time.
Thus if increasing your email marketing ROI is your main concern as a small business, put your best foot forward to segment your contact list. However, dynamic segmenting isn’t the same as segmenting your potential clients based on demographic data such as age, gender, and locality.
Under dynamic segmentation, you will have to carefully go through the conversion funnel, creating separate groups for each stage of the funnel. This will allow for your contacts to effortlessly pass through the funnel according to their behaviour.
2. Integrate Email with Social Media Marketing
Email Marketing + Social Media Marketing = Maximized ROI
Small businesses, keep this formula in mind. According to researchers, 73% of the marketers stated that email marketing ROI is greater than that offered by social media and other digital campaigns. Nonetheless, considering the fact that social media marketing is on trend presently, when you combine the two methods of marketing, your small business could truly reach for the stars.
Combining social media and email marketing can help you take storytelling to the next level by enabling you to clearly tell the story behind your business, and the services you can offer customers.
Great marketing happens when you solve your prospective customers’ problems rather than simply trying to sell a product. Thus, use email marketing to build relationships, and take advantage of social media marketing to put together amazing content that drives in more sales. After all, it’s about working smarter, not harder.
3. Put A Pixel Tracker To Use
If you have made it up to this point, you might have already learned how important a right email marketing software solution is to your small business. Now, let us move a bit further and take a look at how far automation can go.
Using a pixel tracker to monitor your subscribers’ activity across your website and newsletters enables you to draw down their behavioral patterns. With the information gained, automated emails are sent your subscribers’ way with specific messages generated by their recent action.
Being a small business, it’s not always that you find actions made within the mail-box. Thus, pixel trackers allow you to draft and send emails based on a customer’s predetermined behavior.
4. A/B Testing
If you are investing in an email marketing software solution, it is a must that you take up A/B testing as well. It is a modest tool which allows you to divide your audience, and try out multiple versions of a campaign to measure results and thereby make modifications.
Even if you know your audience inside out, there is always room for improvement. Let it be the layout, slogans, or call to actions, A/B testing permits you to do it competently.
In summary, if you are a small business struggling to get a taste of success, the best way to go about it would be by utilizing big data. There are a lot of things you could do maximize your email marketing ROI.
Opt for an excellent email marketing automation software with advanced features to save time and huge chunks of money which would otherwise have to be spent on mastering the skills and applying them to your campaigns.
