Some time ago, I was reading a book about a fisherman. In that book, the fisherman said that the sea will drown you if you are not there with a clear goal in mind. Email marketing is exactly like the sea. 🌊 You need to know your email marketing goals to avoid confusion in your campaigns and have successful results.
The first step of a good email marketing strategy is proper targeting. When you have a clear goal, it’s much easier to prioritize actions, track your progress, and make sure you’re on track.
In this article, I will give you a road map to guide you step by step in setting clear and strong email marketing goals. Just like a warrior with a sword and shield, you need to equip yourself with the ability to track open rates, increase conversions, and foster stronger customer relationships.
Email marketing is fiercely competitive, so read this article to the end. 🔚
Why Should You Set Email Marketing Goals?
As we mentioned, businesses that want to maximize the effectiveness of their campaigns must clearly define their email marketing goals. Not having a goal is like being lost in a desert without a compass. This will help you align with your business goals, have a coherent strategy, and ensure the growth of your campaigns.
Setting goals helps clarify the path the sales and marketing teams will take, prevents them from going sideways, and saves time and energy.
When you have a specific goal, you can measure your progress. This measurement can include open rate, click-through rate, and conversions, which indicate the performance of each email according to its purpose.
For example, click-through rates become essential indicators if the goal is to increase website traffic. These goals allow teams to evaluate their performance and readjust and improve it if needed.
Another reason to set email marketing goals is their direct link to ROI. Campaigns aligned with strategic goals are likely designed for ideal recipients to target their specific needs. Such a focus can increase engagement, customer loyalty, and conversions, translating into a higher return on investment.
In general, setting goals prevents fruitless efforts. You need to know what you will achieve at each step of the way to move more thoughtfully and purposefully. Chasing an imaginary butterfly is easy, but it may cause you to fall to the bottom of the valley. Clear goals turn random campaigns into strategic tools that support business growth, avoid wasted time, and increase engagement.
How to Set Effective Email Marketing Goals?
To set effective and professional goals in email marketing, you will need to consider some factors, which I will review in this section. So, let’s see what they are. 👇
1. Define Your Purpose
First, specify the main purpose of your campaign. You can start email campaigns regarding customer goals. The common goals discussed below include increasing brand awareness, generating leads and conversions, retaining customers, or encouraging engagement with content.
2. Use SMART Goals
We generally use the SMART framework to determine email marketing goals. Goals should be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
Each of these elements guides businesses in creating focused data-driven goals.
An example of a good SMART goal might be “increase open rates by 16% in the next quarter” instead of a general goal like “increase engagement.” This goal is specific, measurable, and based on a timeline.
3. Align Goals with Business Objectives
The goals of email marketing must be aligned with the business objectives. Assuming your business goal is to increase sales by 20 percent, your email marketing goal can be to “increase click-through and conversion rate on product ads.”
4. Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Define and use correct KPIs to measure email marketing performance and success. Some of these measures include:
- Open Rate: This is used to know exactly how interesting your subject lines are.
- Click-through Rate: This metric will determine how effective the content and call to action are.
- Conversion Rate: This refers to the rate at which emails are converted into desired actions, such as buying or signing up.
- Unsubscribe Rate: This tells you how well the target audience appreciates your emails.
5. Segment Goals by Audience
We always recommend customer segmentation, right? For example, new customers, loyal customers, people who have abandoned a shopping cart, and people who haven’t bought from you for a long time—their needs could be different. Setting the correct goals for each segment, like increasing the engagement of new subscribers or reducing the churn rate of existing customers, may help make your campaigns more effective.
6. Track Progress and Adjust
Follow the trend of your performance and analyze it. Keep track of your progress to see if your approach is on track towards achieving your goal. Be flexible; tweak and change any part of the goals, approach, or strategies necessary and modify goals based on what generates the most engagement.
Popular Goals for Email Marketing Campaigns
As mentioned above, identifying the goals is the first step in setting email marketing topics. Email marketing campaigns are a wonderful tool for communicating with audiences and achieving various marketing goals that must be targeted.
So, how about we check some of the most common goals in this section? 👇
✔️ Brand Awareness
Another goal of email marketing could be to stimulate brand awareness to engrave their brand in the leads and customers’ minds. Consistently sharing useful content, such as blog posts or industry news, can have a significant priming effect on brand recall.
✔️ Customer Engagement
Email marketing is one of the best ways to encourage customers to interact with your brand. Attractive emails, such as newsletters or interactive surveys, emails with interesting subject lines, etc., can increase the open and click-through rates. According to Campaign Monitor, emails with interactive features have a 73% higher open rate than regular emails.
✔️ Lead Nurturing
A frequent goal is to deploy lead nurturing campaigns that help to move potential customers along the sales funnel by delivering customized content that is relevant to them.
For example, a company may send educational emails containing product insight information to warm leads. 80% of new leads never turn into sales, and companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost.
✔️ Conversions
Most email campaigns are just about turning leads into customers. These campaigns often consist of sales-oriented emails, e.g., discount codes or limited-time offers, and are aimed at immediate action by the recipients. According to Jeffbullas’s website, consumers buying goods advertised via email increase their spending by 138% compared to consumers not provided with email offers.
✔️ Retention
Email campaigns aim to retain leads. A company can, for example, launch campaigns with targeted preferences and personal offers or loyalty programs to raise customers’ lifetime value. Statistics show that 56% of people will return to the website when they receive a personalized email.
Why Is Email Marketing a Great Option?
Email marketing is a valuable tool for businesses with its many benefits. One of these advantages is its affordability. In contrast, with traditional marketing, a company can target a wide audience with minimal investment, which is possible for companies of any size.
Setting your email marketing goals can help you tailor your campaigns. Is your goal to nurture leads, introduce the product, increase sales, or increase conversion rate? You can have it all, including budget planning and ROI.
Other advantages of email campaigning include automation. You can automate this process using platforms like HubSpot and Mailchimp to set up workflows, automatically sending the most relevant emails at the most suitable time, depending on which stage the customer is in within the sales pipeline.
For example, automated messages can be set for welcome notes, reminders for shopping carts, and even birthday offers scheduled for communication with less human intervention.
Some experts also call customer segmentation a benefit of email marketing and the ability of businesses to craft messages that can meet their customers’ behaviors, preferences, and demographics.
Of course, the easiest way to get the most of this beneficial feature of email marketing can be using lead generation platforms like CUFinder first to have an ideal customer segmentation with the help of a huge database with data of over 419 million people and 269 million companies, and second, make sure of their email addresses reliability which is over 98% in this platform.
As I have said above, the more tailored and customized an email is, the higher the engagement rate is because recipients feel your email is written exclusively for them.
In addition, email marketing provides useful analytics, including open and click rates, that allow marketers to refine and optimize their strategies continuously for even better bottom-line results.
10 Techniques to Achieve Your Email Marketing Goals
Even a simple task like running requires knowing some techniques, so naturally, you need some tips and tricks to achieve your goals in email marketing (as a complex process) and cold email. Here, I will introduce ten techniques you should know and use for the best result.
⚠️ Spoiler alert: you may already know some of them.
1. Cleaning the Email List
One of the most common email marketing techniques is email list cleaning. Cleaning the list means removing inactive email addresses and unsubscribed contacts. To get the most out of your email list, remove inactive contacts and people who have marked your content as spam.
You can use the free email verifier of CUFinder for this purpose. It checks email validity in bulk and instantly.
2. Providing Value to the Customer in Every Email
Providing value to your subscribers is just as important as your email marketing strategy. Another email marketing technique is providing valuable content to the customer. By doing this consistently, your audience gets liklier to open and read your email and even count down the days until you send them a new one.
The meaning of providing value in each email is to include articles, good content according to the audience’s needs, attractive discounts, excellent customer service such as responding to reviews and problems, informing about products or services, and creating an attractive shopping experience in each email.
3. Optimizing the Call to Action (CTA)
Another email marketing technique that can dramatically affect the click-through rate of your emails is an attractive and professional call-to-action (CTA). According to the A/B test results, you can use different CTA buttons and texts to check which call to action is more attractive to the customer and invites the person to do what you want.
4. Using of User-Generated Content
Another very effective email marketing technique is User-Generated Content (UGC). When subscribers realize that other audiences have used and are satisfied with your brand and products, they are likelier to click and open your email.
Integrating things like customer photos with the product, videos made, comments, and stories in the email and website will increase the optimization of the email open rate.
5. Using Effective and Influential Subject Lines
Effective subject lines are also a technique of email marketing, and they play a major role in the email open rate. Since email subscribers open based on the title alone, your subject line should be catchy to persuade the recipients to click on it.
6. Attempting to Bring Back Inactive Customers
Try to get them to open again because it is easier and more cost-effective to return former customers than to find new ones. It costs 5 times more to attract new customers than to retain existing ones. For this reason, retargeting subscribers is essential to your email marketing strategy.
When designing a subscriber return email campaign, your goal should be to reactivate inactive subscribers. Try offering them something new or showing them a different side of your business to get their attention.
7. Personalization of Marketing Emails
Would you believe that 70% of brands don’t use email personalization? This statistic becomes even more shocking when you get to know that 91% of consumers want to work with a brand or company that meets their needs and wants. Another email marketing technique that has great results is email personalization.
Today, email personalization is a must-do for all businesses, regardless of size or industry. This method provides the audience with a more personalized customer journey.
Conclusion
We gave you a roadmap of email marketing goals, why you need to set them, how they help your business, and even some tips for setting them. Yes, email marketing is still a thing! Companies still use emails to reach their most ideal customers and convince them to buy. 88% of people check their emails daily, which is a big number. You see how email marketing goals help you, right?
FAQs
1. What goals should marketers take into consideration in their email marketing?
Some reasonable goals include earning loyalty from target audiences, maximizing interaction, and converting. Other specific objectives include making the company name very well-known, gaining a high degree of client confidence, and providing valuable content that engages the target clients in your programs.
2. What is a good email open rate?
Good email open rates depend on the industry, yet an open rate between 17-28% is generally accepted as good.
3. What is the future of email marketing?
The most preferred forecast of email marketing into the future revolves around hyper-personalization, AI automation, and interactive content.
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