The perils of email benchmarks: How you should really measure the success of your email marketing
Email deliverability expert Travis Hazlewood returns to his discussion on the perils of comparing your email marketing performance to industry benchmarks—and shares what you should do instead .
Email benchmark reports can seem like an ideal way to compare the success of your email strategy against others in your industry. The problem is, that they are too unreliable for almost too many reasons to keep track of. Some of the most significant factors are:
With all of that said, we still need to be able to understand what our email engagement metrics mean, as they are the main source of information here. While you can’t treat engagement metrics as gospel, you can use them as a window of understanding into the health and relationship state of your brand with your audience. Focusing on the characteristics of a healthy relationship with your subscribers and maintaining that relationship with each subscriber becomes the route to achieving success (aka conversion).
How do you do that though? How do you gauge and manage the much more fluid and obfuscated idea of success in email marketing? And is there a way to make it more tangible and practical for identifying success and failure?
?There is.
A better approach to managing and gauging your email strategy’s success can be achieved with the following:
The true success and failure of your email marketing simply comes down to your relationship with your subscriber base. That means that one business's relationship with its subscribers can never be accurately compared to another's, especially in attempting to understand what is needed for improvement.?
Your audience is different than everyone else’s, and that's awesome.
So, if you want to measure the performance of your email marketing, there's no point in comparing your engagements to industry benchmarks. Instead, you should be focused on establishing your own benchmarks for success and watching things grow from there.
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Out of the weeds: How to build a high-level marketing automation strategy that drives better customer experiences
Automation is a critical component of modern marketing that enables timely, relevant, and personalized customer communications at scale. It is so ubiquitous that many marketers see it as a tool or tactic that helps bring their campaigns to life, rather than a strategy itself. This may not cause any near-term headaches when marketing automation is being used sparingly. But as you increase the number and complexity of campaigns and your customer base expands, marketing automation without strategic direction can negatively impact the customer experience, and your bottom line.
?Developing and maintaining a marketing automation strategy can benefit customer experience, business metrics, and daily workflows.?
1. Deliver a better customer experience?
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. In any given week, they could receive five automated emails, one SMS, three pop-up or in-app notifications, and an undetermined number of advertisements.? This might seem like a lot, but volume is unlikely to be received negatively if the content is relevant, personalized, and in line with the preferences they’ve given your business. In short, customers care more about quality than quantity.? A marketing automation strategy will set guidelines around personalization and rules around communication that ensure customers receive relevant content at the right time, and on the right channel.?
2. Gain control over the customer journey
You can think of your marketing automation strategy as a set of directions that get your customers from one part of your customer journey map to the next. There may be a few different routes: Some will get customers to the destination faster while others may take a more scenic route, giving the customer more surprise and delight moments along the way.? Consider the expansion phase in SaaS — your customer has completed their onboarding, reached value realization, and is actively using your product. During your customer journey mapping exercise, you may have identified how many customer success interactions customers with the highest MRR have.? It may not be possible to scale that number of one-to-one customer success interactions with your current headcount, but with marketing automation, you can send personalized messages from customer success at scale.?
3. Improve team cohesion
In many businesses, automated marketing campaigns will be set up by marketing, sales, customer success, and finance teams. Without a marketing automation strategy to guide them, there’s a good chance you’ll run into campaign overlap, data silos or discrepancies, and team goals being prioritized over business goals.? When all teams across the organization are aligned on the overall marketing automation goals and guidelines, you can improve team cohesion and create a culture of accountability.? This can be especially important if you are using a new marketing automation platform or re-assessing existing campaigns. Clear strategic direction gives each team and individual a place to start, helping to build momentum.?
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