Are Your Email Marketing Campaigns Effective?

With the explosion of so many different marketing platforms, it’s easy to lose track of your most valuable asset: email.

Email is a critical way to communicate with your fans, inform your customers of new products or projects on the horizon, and to keep your partners in the loop. And with new research revealing why email marketing is more valuable than ever, now is the time to go all in with your campaigns.

But, the email campaign story doesn’t end when you hit “send.” To truly understand if your campaign made an impact, you need to look beyond open rates and click-throughs. Consider examining your entire business from the top down and from social networks to sales.

To get you started, let’s look at the 3 questions all businesses (or their campaign managers) should ask themselves when evaluating their email marketing campaigns.

Question 1: Are my campaigns being talked about?

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, along with a host of other social networking sites, are the first lines of direct communication between you and your customers. Let’s say you run an online business called Bark & Wag that sells anything and everything dog related and you send out an email to all your subscribers telling them that whoever tweets the best reason why they love your store will receive a free order of dog food.

But, it doesn’t end there. You’ll want to know if the number of Twitter followers increased, you received more mentions than average, and the overall number of people who are socially advocating for you have grown to judge just how successful your campaign was.

Question 2: Are my campaigns driving website traffic?

You just wrote a well-researched and informative blog post providing step-by-step instructions about the best way to remove dog stains. Because of the amount of effort you put into writing it, you want to make sure that the most eyes possible see it. So, you send out an email blast to your subscribers letting them know about your new post.

Again, to gauge the overall impact your campaign made, you should be looking at a couple of things. Did this blog post receive significantly more views than others? Did more people in turn, go to your website and browse your items? Once you know the answer to these questions, you can make smarter decisions about how you market your business and where to invest more time.

Question 3: Are my campaigns making money?

Revenue is usually the one marker that businesses live by with others falling by the wayside. This is especially true if you’re in e-commerce. Needless to say, it’s vital to know whether or not your emails are positively affecting your sales.

Let’s say you sent a campaign to your customers giving them a discount on their next purchase of your best-selling bacon-flavored dog bone. What you really want to see here is a noticeable uptick in sales for your newly discounted product. Are people taking advantage of the reduced price or was there no change in behavior at all?

Connect the dots

With the recent partnership between SumAll and Constant Contact, you can see the interactions, ROI and correlations between your email marketing campaigns and the rest of your business quickly and easily. See opens rates, clicks, unsubscribes, and more alongside your social, traffic, and commerce data to get the entire story of your business in one view.

To get more information about just how effective your email marketing campaigns are, check out SumAll.