Deliverability is a prime statistic when assessing the success of your email marketing program. High deliverability rates are a must to ensure your message gets to the right audience, but deliverability is just the minimum standard of excellence your email marketing strategy should be geared to achieve. Think in terms of send optimization – not just reaching the right in-box, but finding it at the proper time with the most compelling message.
Defining Your Audience
Who are your most interested prospects? With send optimization, you’ll learn more about the segments of your email marketing list that produce the largest share of buyers so you can aim the lion’s share of your efforts at them. Let’s say your analytics show that leads who have opened email messages within the last 90 days are the likeliest candidates for a future buy. How do these figures compare with the statistics on recipients who have opened email within the last 180 days?
You may discover there’s not much of a drop-off, which would suggest a longer sales cycle and a need to step up efforts to connect with leads who weren’t a prominent feature in your campaigns. Conversely, you might find a steep decline that would tell you where you could scale back contact to focus your energy on the higher-yield segment.
Establishing Economic Value
When we covered the fundamentals of lead scoring, we discussed the time-sensitive nature of lead development. It does no good to contact a lead who’s just made a purchase with a discount offer or email white paper offers to a prospect who’s only begun to show casual interest. Ranking leads by expected economic value helps you optimize your email marketing program by calibrating your approach to each segment of leads.
Those who are close to sales readiness get in-depth information designed to bring them the rest of the way to making a purchase. Those who aren’t quite there yet go through customized lead nurture programs designed to get them to that point. Segmenting your email marketing audience this way will let you test frequency, ideal mailing times, and other elements of your email program to discover the optimal formulas for sending.
Testing, Testing
Optimization is very much a moving target when it comes to email deliverability. Your business email list decays at a rate of 3 percent per month, on average; in other words, at the end of a year, more than a third of your prospect data could be invalid without email hygiene and data enhancement processes to keep your list up to date. Send optimization includes regular, thorough list cleansing using rule-sets that meet your company’s specific needs.
Another reason to test: The same marketing approach won’t have the same effect in successive campaigns. What worked for audiences a year ago may feel outmoded today. You’ll need to keep up with the pace of change to keep your audience’s attention.
The capabilities of your marketing automation platform’s email marketing system far exceed what most users will ever ask of it. With send optimization, you’re able to get more from the technology, outpacing the competition and earning more business.
© Reach Marketing LLC 2017 All Rights Reserved.
