Email Marketing Tips
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When To Know It's Working
Once you've set up an e-mail marketing and tracking system, you can begin expecting to receive results. However, what do you do with those figures? Would you recognize what they represent and if yes, would you know how to use them? Better yet, will you be able to identify the indicators that tell you your campaign is effective? Here are tips for recognizing the results of your campaign and know when it's working.Know your standards for comparisonYou won't know how well your campaign has been working if you have nothing to compare it with. Let's say you got 150 e-mail messages coming from your market, confirming that they are opting-in for a subscription. If you don't have the metrics to compare that performance with, how do you know that is a good number to have? If you sent out 200 e-mail messages prior to this, that response is a pretty good indication of success. However, if you sent out 2,500 e-mail messages, that's not a very good figure at all. If your goal is to increase your sales at the end of the quarter, for example, you will know exactly whether your efforts have been working or not. Having set the standards with which to compare your efforts will help you determine how well (or badly) your campaign is working.Set a regular schedule for evaluationA sporadic assessment of your performance will not be very effective to determine whether something is working or not. Set monthly, quarterly, semi-annual and annual evaluations for your business so you have enough information to compare later on.Make sure you can distinguish results from one marketing strategy to another.This is important if you are running two or more very different marketing or e-mail campaigns side by side. You need to identify which is which especially if you are using the same recipients. Hopefully, you don't make this mistake and stick to managing a single marketing campaign at a time. If this is unavoidable, make sure you have a way of distinguishing results from different strategies or efforts. If not, you could end up with an erroneous, inaccurate report.Identify isolated factorsCertain factors affect your campaigns. Seasons, events, trends and changes in the market they all contribute to fluctuations in how your customers or subscribers respond to you. If you send out an e-mail marketing campaign about your affiliate program, for example, just a few days after someone who made millions on affiliate marketing got interviewed on national TV, that could affect the type of response you'll have. What would happen months later on if you send out a similar campaign and there is no good news related to your industry? What's the impact on your ROI?Every expense including capital, labor, overhead, facilities; that go into running your business should be a basis for gauging specific performances of certain tasks and campaigns. Set up a system that lets you view how much money goes into a particular effort and then find out if the conversion is enough to cover the expense. Let's say you've spent $300 on a marketing campaign. Over the course of 6 months, you've only received about $375 in sales. That means, over that time period, you only sold $75 worth of your merchandise. That translates to a poor showing of earning less than $15 a month, a measly figure, considering the amount of effort, time and money that went into launching it. If you've set your break-even point and you earned well within the time period, you're doing well. If it takes too long to get your investment back, it's time to re-evaluate what you have been doing wrong.Find out what your customers are sayingCustomer surveys and feedback forms are important for evaluating whether your efforts are working or not. Whatever they contain, consider them as results of your campaign. Take a look at the satisfaction survey. If you could design a measurable survey, the better and find out what your customers or subscribers are telling you. How many complaints have you received compared to the kudos and positive reviews? How important is the segment of your market that gives you the feedback? Do they impact your business significantly or can their comments be disregarded? How useful is your feedback system for bringing in the information you need? Now that you have the results, can you truly use them or do they tell you nothing? Make sure you understand what's involved in your efforts so you'll know exactly when it's working.
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