Email Marketing: What’s Your Endgame?
When you get ready to build your email marketing campaign strategy or plan out your email marketing tactics, there is a question you should ask yourself:
“What’s my endgame?”
Point being: You need to know what you are hoping to accomplish with each of your email campaigns.
There are three main types of email campaigns:
1. Direct Revenue Drivers
These are your obvious email campaigns. Your sales emails, special offers, and discounts. These are emails from which you expect to make money. For such emails, you track the obvious metrics:
- Opens
- Clicks
- Conversions
- Revenue
Using those metrics, you can decide how you will determine campaign success. Is it total revenue? Total number of conversions? New customers vs. Repeat purchases? Average order value? Your KPIs are up to you (and your CMO).
2. Action Drivers
These are emails that aren’t necessarily revenue drivers but are rather purposed to drive action to the website—your bill payment reminders, account updates, and other non-revenue-based campaigns.
For these campaigns, your traditional email engagement metrics may not matter much. Ultimately, the desired action is what drives success.
For example, if you’re sending a payment reminder email with “Your bill is due now” as a subject line, it’s reasonable to assume that your customers don’t need to open the email to pay the bill. So, are low opens and clicks bad for your conversion metrics? Not necessarily.
You need to look at your anecdotal data as well—your website traffic and conversion rates within a certain timeframe post send. Actions mean success, not opens and clicks.
3. Informational Brand Drivers
Some campaigns you send may have no direct effect to your bottom line (at least in and of itself). These could be your general informational emails, your press releases, heck, even your monthly newsletters. These emails would be considered part of your overall branding effort, though each campaign may not be designed to drive revenue or specific actions.
I would consider order confirmations and the like a part of this type of email campaigns. The campaigns themselves may not drive revenue or action, but they are critical touchpoints in your customer lifecycle.
With each type of campaign you send, keep in mind the individual success metrics as well as the impact on your overall customer experience.
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