Granted, email is not the latest thing; it no longer has that sexy, edgy aura. It’s mature, yet with maturity often comes sophistication. Properly executed—with clear objectives, targeted lists, savvy campaigns, relentless tracking, and relevant partnering—email remains a powerful marketing tactic.
Statistics bear out the continued popularity and effectiveness of email. Eighty percent of content marketers use email marketing. Marketers consistently rank email as the single-most-effective tactic for awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention. And 88 percent of marketers say email marketing is delivering a positive ROI.
At the same time, email marketing comes with challenges. It’s hard to get the attention of your intended recipients. Open rates are down. Spam reports are up. The inboxes of busy professionals are overflowing. Other forms of communication—social media, texting, etc.—are growing. Perhaps your own email marketing programs to your house lists aren’t performing the way they once did.
These challenges can be overcome. Incorporate these five strategies into your email marketing efforts and your results should dramatically improve.
1. Determine your goals in advance
At Biocompare, we like to drill this message home: no matter what marketing campaign you’re launching, you must establish campaign goals and metrics for success up front. Are you trying to increase website traffic, grow brand awareness, generate new sales leads, or sell new versions of products to current customers? Perhaps you want to spark registration for a webinar or white paper downloads?
Goals must come first because goals drive all subsequent decisions you make in your campaign, including decisions about your audience, metrics, email frequency, and choice of media partners.
2. Analyze your audience
What are the challenges and needs of your target audience? What do they already know about your products and services? What do they need to know? Are they decision-makers, recommenders, or influencers? The more you know about your audience, the better you can craft targeted, relevant messages and offers that will drive the desired action.
If the audience you want to reach is not currently in your database, you may be considering renting or buying an email list from a provider who 'scrapes' email addresses from online sources of data such as PubMed. We strongly discourage this. Rented lists generated in this fashion are notoriously poor performers. They are more likely to contain outdated or invalid email addresses, which will drastically decrease results. In addition, rented lists might not be opt-in, which means you will be emailing a less targeted and motivated audience. This will likely lead to an increase in spam reports and may even damage your company’s reputation.
At the same time, there are many potential customers out there who may be difficult for you to reach, yet are good candidates for your products and services. If they aren’t on your email list, and rented lists don’t perform, how can you connect with a new audience using email marketing?
The answer is to work with a trusted partner. Unlike list rentals, in which you have to prepare, send, and track the email yourself, a partner will send the email on your behalf to their list. This can work to your advantage if the marketing partner has a strong reputation with the intended recipients and a highly targeted list.
For example, Biocompare offers email blast and eNewsletter offerings that can reach 50,000 and 58,000 opt-in subscribers, respectively, in the life sciences markets. This is a great way to gain visibility in new markets or with hard-to-reach prospects and decision makers.
3. Focus on metrics that matter
The nature of email makes tracking easy. You can measure emails delivered and opened, links clicked, shares, spam reports, and more. Take measurement a step further and track your landing page performance: downloads, time spent on page, clicks.
However, don’t just measure whatever can be measured. Instead, have purpose. Apply science. Go back to your goals. They determine what metrics are important to measure.
For instance, you might earn a high open rate on your email because your subject line was compelling. But if your goal was to drive users to your website in order to fill out a form and download a white paper, then open rate is not the most important metric. Click-through rate is more important. Conversions measured in downloads is more important. In this situation, a high open rate doesn’t indicate success, and may in fact mask failure if your click-through or conversion rates are low.
4. Don’t be one and done
One of the biggest mistake marketers make is sending out the solitary email blast. Chances are it won’t work. Instead, plan multi-touch email campaigns, also known a drip campaigns.
In drip campaigns, you can use the same offer and experiment with different creative, or, even better, you can nudge prospects along during the stages of their buy cycle or send them different emails based on their behavior. For example, emails early in the campaign might offer educational articles or white papers. Later emails might offer a webinar invitation, specification sheets, or ROI calculators. A prospect that downloads a white paper might get another email inviting them to a webinar.
Multi-touch campaigns almost universally perform better than single email blasts. In statistics compiled by Biocompare, single email blasts averaged 17 percent open rates and nine percent click-through rates, whereas multi-touch email campaigns achieve open rates between 30-50 percent and click-through rates up to 15 percent.