Email Marketing : Brand communications & Database hygiene
Author : Ekta Sharma
One of the key changes the digital channels and strategies have brought to marketing has overall changed the entire marketing lifecycle. Now marketing campaign data is not only used as a medium of advertisement but also for client engagement. Data can be analyzed and turned into useful information to improve the future campaigns.
Within digital marketing, the email channel has shown success through open rates, click through, bounce rates and a number of other metrics. One challenge faced throughout made the data actually useful, it just that it needs to be further analyzed and utilized in a meaningful fashion. So a set of analyst were included to do a 360 degree analysis of the data. CRM is in place to fullfill all the data related needs but various strategies like Subscriber Contact List Management, Personalised Emails, Blast Targetted Emails, Campaign tracking & Reportsed were discussed indepth to cater all sectiosn of our B2B clients.
I use to feel that emails can only create a bit of awareness & the conversion rate will never reach my expectations but it has sustained to a certain level to overcome the digital disconnect between the technology & public communication. We discovered that to overcome the challenges, the marketing team needs to put a name and face to brand communications. By initiating a monthly email series from the Vice President/ Managing Director of client relations, the team has been able to decrease the unsubscribe rate and increase conversions.
Email campaign gives the subscribers the idea that while we're trying to provide as much value with our email newsletter, we can also position ourselves to politely and somewhat softly engage our users, and let them know that we're more than our content, our newsletter.
The campaign also included several programs, each reaching out to specific spaces within the product's sales funnel, including:
Awareness phase
Consideration phase
Evaluation phase
Customer success phas
For example, the evaluation phase email campaign was a 30-day program with a multi-touch email stream, and the conversion goal of the program was to convert prospects who were evaluating the software into paying customers.
The email stream was triggered by an evaluation form submission and included seven touches:
Immediately after the form submission
Day 1
Day 7
Day 14
Day 21
Day 28
Day 30
This stream of lead nurturing emails was compared against what had previously been a single-touch email during the evaluation phase. During beta testing, conversion was 8% compared to the previous single-touch email's conversion rate of 4% — a promising result for the team.
The first data analytics challenge occurred when the seven-touch program rolled out within the country and conversion dropped from 8% to 5%. At the same time, the team wasn't overly concerned since the program went from a relatively limited beta test to emails sent to the entire country, and gradually the numbers triggered & we observed that conversion was better than the previous single-touch campaign.
We were thrilled with the rates and the growth we experienced. And as a result, we just had our biggest quarter, and our biggest month ever was June.
The results they were able to garner include:
200% increase in conversions
60% open rate
20% click-through rate
7% conversion rate
The team was able to drive the unsubscribe rate down 48% from the regular newsletter. The average open rate for the email program also saw a 100% improvement upon introducing these personalized emails. The conversion rate at 3% was much higher than the 1% rate from the regular newsletter to the "soft language" of the personalized emails.
We had lots of personalized emails that were triggered automatically from our database to clients who had active opportunities with us. So they were getting automatic updates based on various stages of their opportunities. These status updates were seeing encouraging engagement & after this campaign have integrated a cross-selling campaign to active clients. And this is how we have been able to successfully implement an email campaign and get expected results.
