Email marketing is a powerful tool for building customer relationships and driving sales. But with so many emails flooding inboxes, it can be difficult to stand out and achieve a strong return on investment (ROI).
This guide will explore some proven tactics for boosting your email marketing ROI.
What is Email Marketing ROI?
Email marketing ROI indicates how effective your email marketing campaigns are and how your audience responds. This takes into account any of the funds you’ve spent on making your marketing strategy work.
Email marketing has been proven to have the best return on investment of any channel, with a whopping 4,000% ROI! For every $1 spent on email marketing, marketers can make up to $40.
This ROI can even be higher, depending on the industry. The highest email marketing ROI is within the Retail/eCommerce/Consumer Goods sector at 45:1, followed by Marketing/PR Agencies at 42:1 and Software/Technology at 36:1.
If you have a well-thought-out email marketing strategy, your business or brand can get many benefits, some of which include more conversions and increased sales, reaching large audiences or smaller targeted lists, and creating personalized shareable content. With this, you can expand the reach of your business and monitor its growth over time.
How to Calculate Your Email Marketing ROI
Calculating the return on investment (ROI) of your email marketing campaigns is essential to determine the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
The basic email marketing ROI formula is:
Email Marketing ROI = (Gained Value – Spent Value) / Spent Value x 100%
Gained Value: this refers to the revenue or profit you’ve generated from your email marketing campaigns.
Spent Value: this refers to the direct, indirect, and overhead expenses you’ve made in your email marketing campaigns.
The ROI formula takes into account both gained value and spent value to calculate the effectiveness of an investment or campaign.
For example, if you invest $1000 in a marketing campaign and generate $2000 in revenue, the gained value is $2000, and the spent value is $1000. Using the ROI formula, the ROI would be:
ROI = ($2,000 – $1,000) / $1000 x 100% = 100%
This means that for every dollar spent on the marketing campaign, your business gained $1 in profit.
How Does Email Marketing Generate a Return for Your Business?
There are several ways by which email marketing can generate a return for your business. This includes:
1. Increased Sales
One of the biggest advantages of email marketing is how it generates sales for your brand. With promotional emails and newsletters to your email list, you can encourage them to take action and purchase one of your products or services.
This is the best time to personalize and segment your emails to ensure that every email they get moves them closer to becoming a paying customer.
2. Improved Customer Retention
When you share regular updates about your brand with your subscribers and active customers, it improves customer relationships. This can be beneficial to you in the long run, as the long-term success of your brand highly depends on how trustworthy your customers find you.
Emails have also been shown to drive more conversions than other social marketing channels as illustrated in the image below.
Sending regular updates and exclusive content to your subscribers improves customer loyalty and reduces churn rates. Through this, you can provide excellent customer service, which will contribute to improving your customer retention rate.
3. Higher Website Traffic
You can drive more traffic to your website by including the link in your emails. This is a great way to promote your blog posts and also link to your products or services. With an increased open rate, there will be an increased chance of conversions and sales on your website.
4. Cost-effectiveness
Email marketing is a more cost-effective way to reach your target audience, compared to traditional methods. Advertising via TV or radio stations will require more resources and effort and even consume time and budget.
On the other hand, you can work with a more focused team to push out an email marketing campaign within a day that can also be automated. This saves you time and resources while you engage your subscribers and drive conversions.
5. Data Insights
Email marketing service providers allow you to track your metrics on every email campaign sent to your audience. This includes the open rates, click-through rates, and other important metrics to help you gain valuable insights into your audience’s preferences and behavior. With this information, you can optimize future campaigns for better engagement and results.
10 Amazing Tips to Boost Your Email Marketing ROI
If you’re looking to boost your email marketing ROI and get the best results, here are some proven and trusted tips to guide you.
1. Segment Your List
Email segmentation allows you to send more targeted and personalized emails that can improve your campaign results. You can segment your email list based on factors such as demographics, purchase history, engagement level, and sales funnel stages.
According to Campaign Monitor, marketers who segment email lists increase email marketing revenue by 760%. Also, 39% of email marketers that practice list segmentation see better open rates.
The more you strategize how best to segment your list, the more defined and effective your campaign results will be.
2. Personalize the Message
Personalize your emails to make them more specific and relevant to the recipient. When a subscriber reads an email that seems tailored for them, they are more likely to take action than a general one-size-fits-all message.
Email personalization is beyond using the [First Name] tag. You can take your personalization to the next level by using automated trigger emails. This is based on an action taken by the subscriber.
For example, if a customer purchases a product, you can trigger an immediate follow-up email that complements their most recent purchase. The email could contain other related products or inform the customer better about your brand.
3. Craft Compelling Subject Lines
Did you know that 64% of consumers decide to open emails based on the quality of their subject line? Subject lines are the first thing recipients see and to entice them to open the email, you must make them catchy and compelling enough.
Keep your subject lines short and include the necessary keywords. You can also personalize it by using the [First Name] tag and a sender’s name, rather than the brand’s name. Then, finally, use A/B testing to experiment with different subject lines and determine which ones perform the best.
4. Create Valuable Content
While you may apply all the necessary strategies into getting more user engagement, what will keep bringing your customers back is the content of the email campaigns. Explore all the different types of emails to send to your list and determine which will be more effective.
Create informative newsletters to educate your audience on important topics in your industry. You can also share exclusive offers and valuable resources to leave them wanting more.
Remember that the goal is to build a relationship with your subscribers and encourage them to engage with your content and take necessary actions. So, you shouldn’t over-promote but rather create a balance.
5. Use Eye-catching Visuals
According to a 2015 Content Preferences Survey, 91% of consumers now prefer interactive and visual content over traditional, text-based, or static media. Inserting visually appealing images and graphics in your emails makes them more attractive and engaging.
Reports have also shown that adding videos to your email can increase click rates by 300%.
With visuals, you can convey your message effectively and capture recipients’ attention. It’s often advised to follow the 60/40 rule in email design, where you have at least 60% of texts and 40% of images.
Using this ratio as a guide helps you create a perfect balance between your visuals and texts. The goal is to make the email content as appealing as possible to get the recipients to take action.
6. Optimize for Mobile
Over 61.9% of emails are opened on mobile devices, which means as you create your email designs, you must optimize for mobile. Test your email templates across all screen sizes, from your desktop to your tablet, and mobile device.
If your email doesn’t look good on mobile, chances are that your recipients won’t engage with the content. And worse, they could delete the email, send it to the spam box, or unsubscribe, which could harm your marketing results.
7. Focus on Delivery
Before you can start measuring results, you need to be sure that your recipients are getting your emails in the first place. Run tests on your email drafts before sending them out to your list, to be sure they don’t end up in the spam box.
Avoid the use of spam trigger words to avoid spam filters. Also, your emails should have a clear link to unsubscribe, as users are more likely to report an email as spam if they find it difficult to unsubscribe. Anyone should be able to opt out of your list at any time without breaking a sweat.
8. Include Clear Call-to-actions (CTAs)
Each email should have clear CTAs no matter how long the content is. Be clear on whether you want them to make a purchase, signup for an event, download a resource or visit your website.
Use prominent and compelling CTAs such as Download, Subscribe, Learn More, See More, Purchase, Grab, Click Here, Check it out, etc, to encourage recipients to take action.
9. Send on the Best Days
Understand your users well enough to know the best day and time to send them emails. Audience or buyer personas show you their demographics, behaviors, goals, and the kind of content they are interested in, among other things.
This tells you that if your audience is a teenager in high school, a Monday morning might not be the best time to send them an email and expect maximum results. On the other hand, some people tend to read their emails on a Monday morning.
Knowing your audience makes it easier to determine the best day to send emails. You can also experiment with different days and check the metrics for the one with the best performance.
10. Monitor and Optimize Campaign Performance
Regularly monitor your campaign performance over time as much as you work on your strategy. This includes the open rates, click-through rates, and conversions, all of which can be used to optimize your campaigns, make data-driven decisions, and improve your ROI.
The metrics tool available on your email marketing platform will be sufficient. MailDrip, for example, allows you to monitor each metric for every email or campaign and the same applies to most platforms.
Look through the features of each marketing platform and be sure it’s a great tool to carry out your marketing strategy, including measuring the right metrics. In an earlier post, we shared 11 Things to Consider When Choosing an Email Marketing Tool that can guide you.
Bottom Line
Email marketing is an essential part of any business’s marketing strategy, as it offers numerous benefits, including increased conversions, improved customer retention, and higher website traffic.
In this article, we have shared some of the best tips to implement to help you create a strong email marketing campaign and increase your ROI.
However, you need an effective strategy to lay a solid foundation. This is why the team at MailDrip came up with a marketing strategy template for business owners. With this, you can create a tailored strategy for your business before kicking off your email marketing journey.
You can get the template for free in your email by filling out the form below.
If you are also experiencing any difficulties with navigating the email marketing path, feel free to contact us and we will gladly be of help.
