It is, of course, a subject that has been dealt with many times. We will do the exercise on 2 articles to define how to set up an emailing strategy, first in terms of global management, then in terms of more practical implementation.
Focus!
The first thing you need is to know why you are doing emails, and what results you want to achieve. This will allow you to put in place what you need to analyze your results. Also think long term, or medium term at the most. Because to market by email, you will need a quality contact base; it is not done in a day, and especially, it is maintained.
If you want to develop your marketing via the email channel, the first thing to do is to define the results you want to obtain. The means you will put in place, the type of communication, and the tools you will use will be different depending on your objectives. Of course, if you want to increase your sales, the question to ask yourself is how will email help you? Do you want to increase the visibility of your site? A direct increase in your sales? A loyalty of your customers? It is of course possible to implement several things at once, but Rome is not done in a day, build it little by little and make sure you are well surrounded.
Once your objectives are well defined, you will need to know how to measure the results, which inevitably involves tracking. If you have visibility objectives, it will be important to be able to track the views of your emails, but also the shares on social networks for example.
If you want to check the impact of your emails on your sales, a deeper reporting via the sales site(s) will be necessary, allowing you to have a report of the conversion funnel, from the opening of the email to the purchase confirmation.
There are often gaps in reporting. Tracking the opens and clicks of an email is not enough. These are indicators of the performance of your email, but not the concrete results that the email brings you. For that, you need to look not at the beginning of the journey (opens and clicks in the email) but at the end of the journey (number of shares on social networks, number of sales actually generated by the email, etc.). ). When you look at the performance of a runner, his start only gives you an idea of his abilities, but it is at the finish line that you know his result.
Venice and its canals
In this day and age, the great difficulty in reporting comes from the fact that users go through multiple channels, and that email is not necessarily the trigger, but part of a set that guides your prospects to a sale. So, if your prospect, after seeing a post he is interested in on Facebook and subscribing to your newsletter, comes to your store to make a purchase, how do you measure the impact of an email campaign? Well, it's actually more complicated.
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A certain number of tools are starting to offer multi-channel tracking of your customers, which means that you can effectively track the same customer through the different communication channels, but that it is no longer possible to define which channel will have been decisive for him. On the other hand, it is very interesting, if you proceed step by step, to look at the increase in the number of prospects converted by adding a communication channel. This often shows that, even if an email campaign did not have satisfactory results in terms of direct sales, it influenced sales via other channels (return to the site at another time, purchase in store, etc.). Technically, this requires a certain amount of set up, even a certain amount of set up in order to be able to identify the same consumer via different channels, but once it is ready, you then have all the time in the world to see the impact of your different means of communication, and to refine your campaigns little by little in order to get the best results.
In short, I did some reporting
All this to say that, if you want to have an idea of the ROI of your campaigns, you have to give yourself the means to have a quality reporting, and to do it step by step. And keep in mind that too many numbers kill numbers. If you have such a long report that you have difficulty isolating the information you are looking for, you lose all the benefit of the tool capable of producing such a report.
Of course, we are also preaching to the choir. And Badsender can help you at any time in these processes, from the definition of the processes to the analysis of the results, through the technical implementation. But Badsender does not work miracles*, if you want a very complete reporting, you will need the tools to do it.
The attentive reader will have noticed that it is repeated a number of times to "do things little by little". It is indeed important to become familiar with the different actions implemented in order to master them, and then to move on.
If you want to run, you train, you find your rhythm, you equip yourself, and you develop your abilities. If you're not athletic and you start running a marathon, at best you'll get a bad score, but you'll risk strains and other similar surprises.
Well, email marketing is the same way. Wouldn't it be silly to get a stroke? 🙂
