The importance of data and how it impacts your marketing ROI
As much as marketing is fuelled by creativity, it is also a fact that data equally drive successful marketing. Data from your campaigns tell you whether your creatively crafted campaign is working or not. As such, data is a very crucial part of every marketing campaign. It helps marketers make better decisions to improve campaign performance. In this piece, we will look at the benefits of data to your email marketing and what type of data you need to pay attention to.
With the introduction of data-driven marketing, you have access to analytical tools that give you accurate data on who saw and interacted with your campaign. It allows you to gain an in-depth understanding of your customers’ needs and behavioral patterns. This way, you can design effective strategies that speak to their needs and solves their problems.
How data enhances the ROI of your email marketing campaigns
To be able to appreciate the impact of data on your email campaigns, you first have to understand the power it gives. Take a step back to the pre-digital era, where traditional marketing was the only marketing available. Billboards and newspaper adverts are great, but what if you wanted to find out how many people saw and interacted with your campaign? It would be difficult to get an accurate understanding of your marketing campaign’s impact.
User acquisition data
The most important type of data that you need even before you send your first email campaign is understanding who your audience is and where they are coming from. Modern businesses have multiple touch points where their brands connect with your audience across different tools, services, and points of sale. It’s critical that you bring your audience’s information into one central place before you start messaging them. Look for information such as:
- The source of your customers.
- The channels or platforms you used to acquire them.
- Demographic information such has location and gender.
Engagement data
The behavioral patterns of your subscribers give vital data that can help you understand how your subscribers react to your campaigns. This kind of data is standard, with most email marketing platforms displaying them on their dashboards. They track and submit data such as:
- Open rates - How many subscribers open your emails?
- Click through rates - How many subscribers click your links and call-to-action?
- Link clicks - Which links did your subscribers click and how many times they did?
- Unsubscribe rates - How many people have unsubscribed from your email lists?
Revenue and ROI data
Then there is the data that speaks to the results of your campaigns. This kind of data tells you whether your email strategy is working out or it’s failing. As a marketer, you will be keen on analyzing this data as it directly relates to sales and revenue. The kind of insights to generally look out for in email marketing are:
- ROI - What is the return on investment of your campaigns?
- Revenue - What is the revenue you are generating from your campaigns?
- Conversion rates - How many people are your campaigns converting into leads and prospective buyers.
- Product Purchases - What products are customers purchasing and at what frequency?
Purchase history is an amazing source of data, especially for eCommerce brands. You want to be able to send highly personalized emails to your audience and purchase history data will get you started. You can use this data to recommend complementary products to a customer’s recent purchase. tinyEmail as an email service provider can integrate with Shopify to pull up all the purchase history data of subscribers and more. You can go ahead and segment subscribers now based on their purchase history. Group frequent, low and inactive buyers into different segments respectively and send out personalized campaigns to each.
Website traffic data
Tracking website visits from your emails give you the essential information on how many of your subscribers are clicking through after reading your emails, going onto your website, and how they are engaging there. It can also tell you what your subscribers are interested in the most. Did they add products to the cart? How long did they stay on product pages? Having this data helps you make better decisions for your email campaigns and marketing strategy in general. Modern tools allow you to track subscriber behavior in many different ways than you can think of. With the help of website cookies, you can even track which subscribers came back to your website after the initial visit. Once the right tools are in place, you will be able to gather data from the point subscribers interact with your emails to when they finally convert.
Email delivery data
After you have spent time and resources to create a stunning email campaign, you need to be sure that they are being delivered to your audience. You should start by ensuring that your emails are not getting bounced or ending up in the spam folder. Avoid using words that trigger spam filters in email service providers. We have a list of 200+ spam words you should avoid. Always test your emails for deliverability before sending them off. Send the completed campaign to yourself and make sure it is delivered to your inbox just as it should. You can easily pick up deliverability issues by sending test emails to yourself.
Statistics on email preferences
It is much easier and straightforward when subscribers tell you what they want from your emails. You don’t have to guess and testing is reduced. You can get customers to give you their preference data by setting up preference centers. When a new subscriber signs up, they can set their preferences to tell you what they would love to hear from you. Encourage your subscribers to update these preferences whenever their interests change. It is common practice to see preference centers linked to the footer of emails for easy access. Email preference data allows you to segment users who have similar interests so you can send personalized emails that pique their interests and benefit them directly. This leads to higher engagement and conversion rates. Imagine showing your newest summer collection to your subscribers who have expressed interest in summer wear? Making sales is a no-brainer.
Mobile usage statistics
About 4 out of 10 emails are opened on mobile. This is almost half of all emails being sent. To give you a perspective of the scale, there are about 333 billion emails sent a day. This means that a sizable amount of your audience may be opening your emails via mobile devices as well. Keeping track of these subscribers will help you create more mobile-friendly strategies and designs. Your emails must always be optimized for mobile to enhance the user experience of your mobile users. If you are using templates, make sure they are responsive to mobile screens as well. You should also pay attention to the analytics after each report to see how many mobile users are interacting with your emails. Based on that, you can easily make adjustments to your strategy and content.
Wrapping it up
Digital marketing comes with the power of data that will help you make informed decisions. Data gives you a more thorough understanding of your subscribers and how you can serve them better. As a marketer, you would need to pay attention to the behavioral, results, and experiential data your campaigns produce. With these, you will be able to track open and engagement rates as well as conversion rates of your campaigns. You will also be able to assess the reasoning behind why subscribers react to your campaigns the way they do. Finally, pay attention to the suggested sources of data that will help you optimize your email campaigns for the best results.
