How to Get a High Return on Investment from Email Marketing

Email marketing has come a long way and we can’t imagine the marketing realm without it. Apart from being a cost-effective marketing strategy, email marketing is a relatively effortless medium for building brand loyalty.
The truth is loyal customers are always looking forward to a new update from you! Sending email messages to them consistently can keep them updated about your offerings, events, and the latest arrivals.
With that, any business owner can invest in email marketing to improve conversions, sales, and profit margin. Email marketing has also proven to improve business ROI and customer retention. Additionally, it can offer a reliable support system for other online marketing techniques like SEO, PPC, and content marketing.
But, are you wondering how you can improve the returns of your email marketing efforts? This piece of content explores the different ways you can fetch a high return on investment via your email marketing efforts;
- Sieve Your Email List
You can’t run an effective email marketing campaign without an updated subscriber list. Certainly, you wish every effort to count! However, over time, some subscribers may become inactive or unsubscribe.
With that ensure to clean up your email list. Sieve your subscribers’ list to understand which subscribers are actively engaging with your brand and why others aren’t. Also, leverage AI analytics tools to attain actionable insights about your subscribers.
Such insights will help you know the performance of your email marketing campaign for better customer lifecycle management. Also, other tools like GetResponse and Aweber will help you integrate third-party tools for higher efficiency.
Therefore, to get the best from your email marketing campaigns, ensure to first clean up your email list.
- Create Compelling Subject Lines
How do you get your subscribers to open up your emails and take the necessary action? It’s fundamentally through creating compelling subject lines. As much as many people wake up to their emails every morning, many of them only pay attention to emails that stand out.
An attractive subject line can undoubtedly help you capture a subscriber’s attention and make them open your email. Generally, a subject line is a sentence that the intended reader first sees before opening an email.
If the sentence stands out and is informative, a person will certainly be convinced to open up the email. Some of the best tips to create appealing email subject lines include;
- Addressing a person by his or her name
- Creating short subject lines
- Actively encouraging action
- Avoiding spam words
These tips will help you capture attention and increase the click-through rate. Consequently, this will improve conversion rates and ROI.
- Personalize
Over 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand that personalizes their experiences. Personalization isn’t only for online streaming or selling platforms like Netflix and Amazon respectively, but can also work perfectly in email marketing.
Personalization precisely refers to tailoring experiences to customer expectations and requirements. Unlike before, marketing is now more meaningful thanks to personalization possibilities. Personalization goes way beyond product recommendation to running trigger-based campaigns that are as well personalized.
Emails like “hello Mark, we’ve got something new for you” are certainly game changers. They not only cultivate enthusiasm but also offer a perception that a brand understands customer needs. Personalization can boost business ROI considerably when tactfully leveraged.
- Create Mobile-Friendly Emails
Statista currently indicates that 7.1 billion people worldwide use smartphones and the number is expected to increase. Rather than creating desktop-friendly emails, divert efforts to crafting mobile-friendly emails too.
More and more people are opening emails on their smartphones as opposed to desktops. In fact, other findings indicate that over 45% of marketing emails were opened on a mobile phone in 2022.
With that, create mobile-friendly emails to improve deliverability and optimize results. Precisely, shorten subject lines, reduce image files to improve load speed, and optimize CTAs. Creating mobile-optimized emails increases readability chances which prompts the reader to take the required action.
- Conduct an A/B Test
Running email marketing campaigns without assessing their performance can lead to time and resource wastage. You certainly need to step back and evaluate the performance of your email marketing strategies before allocating a new budget.
Try to understand what works and which areas require improvement. An A/B test can help you understand the effectiveness of every facet of your email marketing strategies. For example, you can test personalization efficacy, word count performance, and the performance of other elements like user-generated content and CTAs.
This can help you reset marketing KPIs or consider additional metrics like list growth rate and unsubscribe rate to improve your email marketing efforts accordingly.
- Include CTAs & Website Links
CTA buttons and website links are additional content marketing tools that can optimize your campaign. They not only provide an immediate guide for a desired response, but they also enhance content quality.
As much as email content must be less than 200 words, ensure to embed CTAs and links strategically. Calls to action are an ideal way to trigger a quick response from the email reader. They also eliminate confusion. On the other hand links, i.e product pages or service pages offer a direct pathway to what your email is all about.
Such links also create an omnichannel avenue that helps a customer pick up from where he or she left off. This can directly improve ROI and customer retention.
- Timing Matters
As much as subscribers can open emails at any time, you must be strategic about your email timings. The latest findings indicate that many people are more likely to open emails early in the morning before 10 AM, around 3 PM, or in the evening around 6 PM.
Therefore, try to send emails within the best suitable time, precisely early morning or on days before an event occurs. Besides that, try to leverage a software tool to schedule and send emails during the best periods.
Also, ensure to track and test the performance of your emails.
- Re-Engage
It is important to keep subscribers engaged. However, what do you do when they are showing signs of inactivity? You re-engage! Re-engaging subscribers first requires a marketer to identify the root cause of the problem. Whether it’s a high rate of unsubscribing, low conversions, or low open rates, a marketer should understand the exact problem.
Some of the possible re-engagement tips may include personalization, creating emails with deadlines, and identifying the stage of a subscriber as per the customer lifecycle. This helps a marketer create content as per the stage of the subscriber. Or as per the requirements of the customer.
How to Get a High Return on Investment from Email Marketing Bottom Line
Email marketing tactics continue to change due to several factors like technological advancement and customer habits. More so, as much as email marketing is a reliable marketing technique today, your emails may fail to receive the required attention due to competition. In this piece, we’ve detailed some of the best actionable email marketing tactics you can leverage for a higher return on investment.
FAQ
How to increase ROI in email marketing?
1. Personalize your emails: Personalizing emails to your customers can help increase engagement, open rates, and click-throughs. This can be done by including the customer's name in the subject line, sending personalized content based on the recipient's interests or past purchases, or segmenting your emails by customer demographics.
2. Optimize your email timing: Sending emails at the right time can have a big impact on open and engagement rates. Consider the time zone of your recipients and the best times for them to receive emails.
3. Make sure your emails are mobile-friendly: With the majority of emails being read on mobile devices, it’s important to make sure your emails are optimized for mobile. This includes using a responsive design and making sure that images and text are legible on small screens.
4. Make use of A/B testing: A/B testing allows you to compare two different versions of an email to see which one performs better. This can be used to find the best subject line, design, and copy to use in your campaigns.
5. Leverage automation: Automation can help you send the right message to the right person at the right time. Automation can be used to trigger emails based on customer actions or to send out regular emails such as newsletters or promotional offers.
6. Track and measure performance: Tracking and measuring the performance of your emails is essential in order to understand which emails are performing well and which need to be improved. Use email analytics to measure email open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.
What is a good ROI for email marketing?
A good ROI for email marketing is typically considered to be around 4:1, meaning for every $1 invested in email marketing, you should expect to receive $4 in return. However, this varies depending on the industry, the quality of the email list, and other factors.
Can you make good money from email marketing?
Yes, email marketing can be a very effective and profitable way to earn money. With effective email campaigns, businesses can reach large numbers of potential customers and generate a great return on investment. Email marketing is also a great way to build relationships with customers and provide them with valuable content.
Does email marketing have a 4400% ROI on average?
No, email marketing does not have an average return on investment (ROI) of 4400%. According to the Direct Marketing Association, the average ROI for email marketing is approximately 122%.
Does email marketing have the highest ROI?
Spending on email marketing yields a high return on investment (ROI). Email marketing is an effective way to increase brand awareness and website traffic, as well as to nurture leads through the marketing funnel. It is also a great way to send out email newsletters and use marketing automation to improve ROI. By investing in email marketing, businesses can drive more sales and revenue, while enjoying a high ROI.
What is the 80/20 rule in email marketing?
The 80/20 rule in email marketing states that 80% of the time should be dedicated to providing useful content and information to customers, while only 20% should be dedicated to sales-oriented messages. This rule helps marketers to keep their emails interesting and relevant to their audience, and to avoid appearing overly promotional.
Is email marketing a real job?
Yes, email marketing is a real job. Email marketing involves creating, sending, and tracking emails to customers and prospects to promote products, services, and other types of content. It is a highly effective form of digital marketing and is used by many businesses to reach out to their target audience.
Guest Contributor: Jessica Robinson loves to write interesting and knowledgeable blogs regarding business management, education, and life to satiate the curiosity of her lovely readers. Currently, she is serving as a content manager at the ‘Speaking Polymath’. Every piece of content that she writes demonstrates her immense love and passion for her profession.