Smart email marketing means better ROI

Email marketing is well known for being a powerful, revenue-generating marketing channel. It’s your main channel for one-to-one communications with your customers. Those who have signed up to receive your marketing are engaged with your brand. They want to hear from you. That’s why email marketing is a guaranteed money maker.

Still, the more advanced you make your email marketing tactics, the better the ROI you will generate.

What are advanced email marketing tactics?

Don’t be daunted. Just because we say advanced, that doesn’t necessarily mean difficult, complicated, or expensive. In fact, most advanced email marketing tactics are already a part of your omnichannel marketing automation platform. You just need to tap into them.

Smart and advanced email tactics use customer data and insights to help you create unique, one-to-one interactions. That means the day-to-day tactics you’re already using are advanced. This includes personalization, segmentation, and marketing automation.

Segmented, targeted, and personalized emails generate an average ROI of 122%. Therefore, the more you employ these tactics, the more revenue you’ll generate.

ROI-generating email marketing tactics

1. Advanced segmentation

Using customer insights, you can create advanced segments to deliver highly targeted, relevant emails to your database.

For B2B marketers, using lead scoring helps you gather extra insights into your customers and their behaviors. You can create segments based on a prospects’ suitability or the way they have engaged with your brand – if they’ve downloaded a specific piece of content or visited a high intent webpage. This means you can create highly targeted customer journeys based on actions and behaviors that demonstrate your understanding of the needs and wants.

Ecommerce marketers, be it in the B2B, B2C, or D2C verticals, can use RFM modeling to create segments. Customers who have recently purchased, are repeat purchasers, inactive, or need nurturing can all be targeted with relevant communications. You can also advance your segments by layering RFM personas with other insights such as the last email open or total money spent.

By building advanced segments you’re able to create singular experiences to drive the results you want.

2. Hyper-personalization

Hyper-personalization sounds scary but it really isn’t. In actuality, it’s way easier than you think to deliver one-to-one, personalized marketing to your customers.

Personalization blocks such as product recommendations and dynamic content already exist within your omnichannel automation platform. All you need to do is plug in your customer data to make them work.

Adding product recommendations to your email marketing generates higher click-through and conversion rates, which ultimately result in better ROI. Product recommendations use customer insights such as recently bought or frequently browsed product to populate your email. These blocks then pull in similar products to showcase catalog items most likely to convert your customer.

The most effective emails to add product recommendation blocks to are:

• Welcome emails
• Abandoned cart/abandoned browse emails
• Win-back emails
• Order confirmation emails

Dynamic content uses data such as marketing preferences to personalize in-email content. You can then build multiple variants of your email based on the segments and preferences you want to target. This is particularly useful when you want to promote regional events or offers. Time zones, states, gender, and more should be taken into consideration when using dynamic content.

These tactics help you deliver highly personalized content. And when you’re driving users to view products, events, and offers unique to them, they’re more likely to convert and engage more with your marketing efforts.

3. Triggered marketing automation

Triggered automations rely on a unique customer’s action. That means that these emails will be highly relevant to the recipient’s specific stage in the customer journey.

Implementing marketing automation is well-known to increase ROI and save users time, but key triggered automation programs are guaranteed to drive meaningful conversions that boost profits. These triggered automations should be set up at crucial touchpoints.

Welcome programs triggered on the point of sign-up are essential. They land with the customer at the point where they are most engaged with your brand. With the highest open and conversion rates of all marketing automation programs, these are a vital part of your email marketing strategy.

Abandoned cart and abandoned browse programs should be landing in the reader’s inbox within 30 minutes of leaving your website. This is the optimal time to reconnect with customers and drive them to convert.

Depending on your business, there may be other key actions you can use to trigger campaigns. For example, a content download after six months of inactivity can trigger a re-engagement campaign. It’s important to understand your customer journey for marketing automation tactics, but when you’ve identified these key touchpoints, you’ll see your ROI skyrocketing.

4. Testing

You’re probably sick and tired of hearing about testing. As marketers, time is a resource we severely lack. Factoring in time to test your email marketing campaigns can seem like a pipedream at best. But that shouldn’t be the case. Testing is just as important to your marketing results as every other part of the campaign building process.

For better ROI, you should be regularly testing key elements of your email. From the subject line, friendly “from” name, content and image layout, and send time, you need to be testing them all.

Customer actions aren’t set in stone, actions and behaviors are frequently changing. Therefore, something that works for one month, may not for your following campaign. It’s important to change-up your tactics frequently, and the best way to do that is through testing. The more you test, the better your results will be.

5. Interactive email marketing

Interactive emails using AMP for email are a relatively new tactic for email marketers. As such, it’s a great opportunity to surprise and delight customers with email marketing, unlike anything they’ve ever experienced.

Interactive emails allow subscribers to interact with your brand without having to leave the inbox. They can scroll products or pages, submit feedback or complete forms, or customize their own content thanks to the power of AMP.

The ability to deliver these moments of delight is the difference between consistently converting customers and having a long list of one-off purchasers.

Getting smart with your email marketing

How much ROI you generate reflects the experiences you create. By adopting these smart email marketing tactics you’re more likely to engage and convert readers, generating more revenue and growing your business faster.

Discover how much ROI your campaigns produce and identify which campaigns you should optimize to improve your results by checking out our email marketing ROI calculator.