Email Marketing Data Chellenges

Integrating email marketing data with other data systems

Marketers want to amass valuable data across their different channels. For instance, they might like to see the possible relationships between landing pages and emails or to track the sales process of an email conversion. In addition to the obvious reporting benefits such integration provides, it also opens the door to a much more enjoyable experience for email subscribers.

Just think about it–if you could bridge the gap between email marketing performance and social media activities, landing page conversions or new customer acquisitions, you are that much closer to optimizing your sales funnel and delivering content that your community loves.

“Other data systems,” including form submissions and activities on site, can point you to the resources your recipients are truly interested in.

In that way, you have a clear understanding of how to further engage them through careful targeting and segmentation. In order to integrate your email marketing data with your other data systems, you need to use marketing software that allows for that integration to take place.

Think Segmentation

Combining your different marketing databases allows for clear segmentation and ability to better target your customers and prospects with relevant email messages. Once you have access to an integrated marketing system, keep your buyer persona in mind and focus on the opportunity to target the right audience with the right message.

Develop Content

The more targeted your email campaigns, the more content you’ll need. Key to promoting relevant content in email is to provide an offer that is connected to the initial request. What action have your contacts taken on (or even off) your website? Offer them content that fits with their intent and their needs.

Improving deliverability

Deliverability rate is the percentage of email messages delivered to your recipients’ inboxes versus the total number of messages sent. It tells you how many of the emails bounced back and if that number is high, it’s a sure sign of inactivity.

There are soft bounces and hard bounces. The soft bounce is temporary and occurs when an email server rejects an incoming message. For instance, when your recipients’ inboxes are full. A hard bounce, on the other hand, is less benign and represents a permanent error to deliver an email. This generally occurs when the addresses you send to are bad or don’t exist.

Low deliverability rate might get you blocked by ISPs (internet service providers). If your list is loaded with inactive emails, you don’t have a sense of your true complaint rate. While many marketers just look at total complaints over total list size, ISPs are actually looking at total complaints over number of active email users.

ISPs can also mark abandoned email addresses as spam traps. This means that, even if you acquired emails in a legitimate manner, the abandoned addresses may have morphed into spam traps. Aside from all the ISP problems, low deliverability rate also means you are wasting money sending messages to nonexistent addresses.

Regular Maintenance

Clean up your email list by removing those addresses that are no longer engaged. You can identify these addresses with metrics such as opens, clicks, or website activity.

A stricter opt-in process

If you have a really serious problem with deliverability, you might want to redefine your opt-in process to prevent invalid emails from getting on your list. Either ask people to enter their email twice or experiment with double opt-in. Make sure your recipients have an opportunity to update their email addresses.

Invite them to your preference center from every email you send. That might also help you with segmentation and achieving higher engagement overall.

Marketing professionals shared one of their most serious challenge in respect to email marketing is growing and retaining subscribers. Increasing the size of your email list and keeping your contacts engaged in your messages is no easy task. These challenges receive two common responses:

To grow their email database, marketers sometimes purchase lists. This practice will surely get you into trouble: it might add invalid addresses to your list and thus pollute your entire database.

Even if the addresses you acquired are valid, the new recipients will most likely not be interested in your content and either unsubscribe or not engage with your emails altogether. Both of these alternatives are undesirable.

To retain subscribers, a lot of companies send fewer emails, thinking that the communication frequency might in some way define engagement. Rarity of emails means they are more special, right? Wrong. Frequency of emailing, as we have established in our Science of Email Marketing research, doesn’t necessarily negatively impact subscriber retention.

Don’t purchase email lists, but earn your subscribers. Be clear to your target market about what they will get out of subscribing to your emails. Give them a clear description of what the value proposition is.

For example, will your emails offer: (1) tips and tools on how to run their business more efficiently, (2) product updates from your company, or (3) special offers via email? Your
audience will want to know “why” they should subscribe before they decide to clutter their inbox with even more emails.

Segment Lists to Match Your Priorities

Are you concerned that you are emailing your subscribers too often? Give this thought a break and instead ask yourself if you are emailing the right people with the right message. In order to retain your email subscribers, you’ll need to provide them with ongoing value that is targeted to their needs.

Make sure you are segmenting based on knowledge you have about your recipients.

Don’t limit your email testing to subject lines. Embrace testing of various elements in your email marketing efforts to optimize email performance. For instance, you can do A/B testing of landing pages.

Achieving Measurable ROI

Achieving measurable ROI (return on investment) is another challenge that marketing professionals face in the land of email marketing. In other words, it’s difficult for them to connect the dots between the messages they send out to prospective customers and the moment when these subscribers get further engaged and turn into customers.

Interestingly enough, this problem is tightly connected to challenge number one – integrating email marketing with other data systems. When your marketing channels are not speaking to one another, it’s hard to identify how they affect conversions.

For instance, you might see that your email blast got a 3.4% click-through rate (CTR), but can you also see if that communication contributed to generating new leads? What is more, do you see if it resulted in any new customers?

The solution to achieving measurable ROI from your email marketing campaigns is to practice closed-loop marketing. Follow a contact from the point of visiting your website through getting further engaged (viewing other web pages, downloading resources, clicking on your emails) to her final conversion into a customer.

Implementing closed-loop marketing empowers you to track leads from their initial channel through a first conversion all the way to becoming a customer. Such intelligence, in turn, enables you to identify your most powerful marketing channels and assign clear value to each of them.

In this way, you will be able to measure the ROI not only of your emails, but also of your other efforts, which might include social media and blogging.

Using email marketing data for funnel optimization

Email campaigns should be only part of your holistic marketing approach. Email cannot be truly fruitful just by itself, but can strengthen your other initiatives. (Just like you cannot use social media in vacuum, or only rely on blogging, or trust that search engines optimization is enough to meet your goals.)

The real power comes from achieving a strong marketing mix. This, however, seems to be a challenge for marketers. How do you optimize your sales and marketing funnel with emails?

Most marketing professionals are accustomed to sending one-time email blasts that are not necessarily related to the actions of their email subscribers, their interests or needs. Such a practice doesn’t help push leads down the sales funnel, but can alienate them.

Lead Nurturing Email Marketing Data

Lead nurturing sometimes goes by other names: marketing automation, drip marketing, auto-responders, etc. Simply put, lead nurturing is a system that allows you to send an automated series of emails to an early stage lead in order to pre-qualify them before handing them over to your sales team.

If it typically takes your leads a month to make a purchasing decision, then make sure you’re spreading out your communications to keep them engaged throughout the month. By taking this approach, you save your sales organizations time because you educate and qualify the lead overtime.

Among some of the key benefits of lead nurturing is that it enables marketers to establish contact with their fresh leads fast and stay top of mind for potential, and even current, customers. In comparison to email marketing, lead nurturing is also relatively easy to set up because it is automated and doesn’t need a ton of maintenance over time.

More from author

Extremely Effective Email Marketing Strategies For You

Email marketing can be extremely effective for advertising products, whether through sale announcements or updates highlighting new...

What Is Hyperconnectivity And Its Impact On Society

What Is Hyperconnectivity And Its Impact On Society: Within living memory, telephone service has cut its link...

Brands Turn To Google And TikTok Boycotts Facebook

Brands Turn To Google And TikTok Boycotts Facebook: Its Facebook and Instagram platforms are likely to collect...

Lean Marketing For Small Businesses

Lean Marketing For Small Businesses - For small businesses, resources can be tight. Especially right now. Limited...

Related posts

Advertismentspot_imgspot_img

Latest posts

Entrepreneurs Failure Stories Are Arguably Just As Important As Their Success Stories

Highlighting the benefits of super successful startups that became a unicorn is common in media. Stories of startups becoming unicorns or entrepreneurs making a fortune...

Shift Away From Cash And Credit Cards To Digital Wallets

By 2025 digital wallet use will account for just over half (52.5%) of ecommerce transaction value worldwide, versus 48.6% in 2021, according to the...

How To Start A Drop Shipping Business In Canada?

You should take several steps to launch an e-commerce venture. First, you should find a niche. Next, you should choose a province to headquarter your...

Want to stay up to date with the latest news?

We would love to hear from you! Please fill in your details and we will stay in touch. It's that simple!