Introduction
With so many different email marketing tools available, it can be difficult to figure out how to use them effectively. While there are a lot of “best practices” in the world of marketing. your best practice is going to vary wildly, depending on your audience.
For example, what works for a mommy blogger, with a large Pinterest following, is going to be dramatically different, from what works for a local plumber’s blog.
In this post, you’ll learn how to use data-driven testing as part of your email strategy.
1. What is a data-driven approach to email marketing?
A data-driven approach to email marketing means that you’re using data to inform your marketing efforts. Old-school approaches to email marketing were chopped and diced down to their constituent parts. People delivered the emails using an order confirmation process or a junk file in a dirty file folder. For this to work consistently, you had to monitor your email campaigns and avoid automated spammers. I’ll show you how we’ve updated the order confirmation emails, and zeroed in on some placeholders that deliver emails consistently, over the long haul.
At Email Same Thing, we’re passionate about helping you get started in the email marketing world. One of the problems that we get asked about most often is how to use email marketing to grow organic traffic. The newsletter is where most of your email conversations happen; however, traffic doesn’t come until the actual sale point. It’s crucial to keep the funnel flowing. With this in mind, we’ve been adding “short-form content” (including case studies for our software) to our newsletters.
The short section of a newsletter is the bulk of your email spend. So we’re always experimenting with how we can make sure that people take the time to read our emails, even if it’s “so-what-if?”
Our goal is to ensure that we have emails of a high enough readability that they’re turning into sales, no matter what the email says. We’ve been doing a few things to reach that goal. One is using case studies, which are the tiny, handwritten content displayed at the bottom of your newsletter. People read these because it’s human interaction engaging content. We also don’t include our email addresses in the case study portion of the newsletter; instead, we include an “add to cart” button with a signature link to verify that you are the owner of the product or service.
2. How should I start using data-driven testing?
A/B testing is a great way to test different variables to see what resonates best with your customers. You can run A/B tests on almost anything you put on your website or social media channels, including colors, images, titles, and more. For today’s post, we’re going to start with email and talk through some of the different types of email content you can use to test with.
Thanks to the superb work of Neil Patel, you can find a bunch of email testing tools available on his blog. Use these tools to familiarize yourself with testing and to see where you might fit into a larger testing strategy.
Email newsletters the old saying goes: “If you send an email to 100 people, you’ll get 100 different results.” The idea behind an email newsletter is that it has your name and a brief message right at the top, with a call to action to take action. An email newsletter ensures that you’re drawing people into your marketing strategy, associating your brand with a specific, actionable message, and resulting in a push for branding.
An email newsletter is a great way to engage people at the start of the purchase journey, so by identifying a product or service your customers are interested in, you can convince them to take the right action without them needing any persuasion at all. But email newsletters aren’t cheap to set up, and you need to be sure you’re not spending money on something that’s not going to keep people happy (and relevant) for the long run.
Email list growth after seeing the success of Jeani Volker’s viral farming newsletter and the resulting increase in signups, Neil Patel put together a free email list testing tool which I used to run the example for this post.
If you run a good email marketing campaign and generate good leads, you’ll start hearing from them through an increasing number of different channels.
3. What other benefits can you expect from a data-driven approach to email marketing?
First, it helps you be more efficient. Email marketing isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, and many marketers make the mistake of sending out the same email to everyone. But, sending the right email to the right person at the right time will get you much better results. So which type of testing do you want to do?
Great, you now know the best way to use email marketing: Email testing. Think of email testing as detective work just like you would do if you were trying to solve a murder mystery. By gathering data and looking into the following online tools you can figure out which approach (CTR, remarketing, content performance, etc.) is going to work the best in your situation.
Do you want to know which types of testing are working best for you based on your website performance, opt-in acquisition, conversion funnel, etc? In this post, I will show you that it’s possible to test multiple times on a single subject.
Content performance with featured snippets
When it comes to featured snippets, domain authority, trust, and actual organic search results all play a key role in the decision-making process of Google. According to Search Engine Land, the “dominant criteria of a featured snippet are domain authority and the presence or absence of a related website. In other words, it’s important to make sure that your site sits at the top of the search results in both featured position and the organic search results so that your brand can be properly associated with that snippet.”
The first step to take now is to gather information on your top competitors based on your emails. These email competitors will be your best source of data since, in the past, they may have been or can be featured snippets. I prefer to include the email address field of a Blogger or other webmaster as the line of communication with them will still be associated with the website.
Conclusion: By using a data-driven approach for your email marketing, you can make smart decisions about what to send, how often to send it, and who to send it to so that you always have the highest chance of success with your emails.
By using a data-driven approach for your email marketing, you can make smart decisions about what to send, how often to send it, and who to send it to so that you always have the highest chance of success with your emails. Social media, SEO, and website analytics are three of the most important places you can get data about your audience. Like it or not, email is an effective way to communicate with people and in today’s post, I am highlighting stats from WordStream’s Email Marketing Benchmark Report to show just how effective email is at reaching its audiences.
Why Email Benchmark Report?
If you haven’t already seen it by now, Marketing Benchmark does really interesting research that shows which email networks are winning and failing. The distribution of email recipients using the different networks, and several other interesting metrics such as clickthrough rates.
What is so interesting is how consistently email performs at the top of the charts, mentioning that the only things that move the needle are social media and SEO. The story behind the email data is quite interesting too. At the beginning of 2012, WordStream was looking to take a deeper look at the data. With that data in hand, we resulting in the Email Benchmark Report.
Data collection process, data challenges, and the forecast
When WordStream initially began its Email Benchmark Report project, they wanted to select and verify the email addresses for a large set of websites using only publicly available information. The initial processes were a little cumbersome since there was a lot of scraping involved. Therefore there were two paramount stages in the email benchmark project that helped to move the entire process along:
Testing:
This involved running some tests to see exactly what emails would perform highest.
Convincing Executives:
This involved convincing executives to send emails using data that we knew would perform best.
There were some key steps that the email benchmark project site took to create the report.