As a business, the question that goes on in your mind is How to reach out to your target audience. The best choice for lead generation is Email marketing as it is more effective than social networking websites like Twitter and Facebook. Focus on executing a successful cold outreach strategy to grow your business. When you implement the proper techniques, you can be certain that your actions bring in the desired outcomes. It is a wonderful platform for interacting and networking with other professionals in the same field as you. It is less invasive than cold calling and enables you to be cost-effective while getting your message to a substantial number of potential customers when used as an approach for cold outreach.
You can’t just let go and give up thinking about your strategy once you’ve finished developing it and implementing it into action. You must be conscious of whether you are doing it correctly. How do you know that? For that purpose, regularly keep monitoring your email marketing kpis. Not only that but be aware of the tips and tricks to tap into the maximum potential of this effective method of communication. Read on to learn more about email marketing kpis and why they should matter so much to you.
How Does Email Marketing Aid in Cold Outreach?
When you are reaching out to someone with whom you have had no relationship before is called Cold Outreach. Sending emails is the most cost-effective way to do so. It facilitates you to let those who didn’t know your business and its products and services become aware of it. Email Marketing, when used correctly, may help you accomplish a significant ROI regardless of the business you are in. Cold email Outreach is just one among the many ways that Email Marketing can help you develop your business.
However, email marketing may only be successful if you have a large consumer base.
But like most people, you will have to first develop your professional network, generate leads, and build business partnerships. For this purpose, you can leverage the community on LinkedIn, the world’s biggest professional platform. It has become a popular medium to reach out to industry experts, decision-makers, and possible customers. But it can become too tedious to keep sending so many invitations to your prospects all day long. Not only that, you may have to follow up multiple times to get a response from them. When you are running cold outreach campaigns with the intent to expand your business, it is better to make use of a trusted LinkedIn Outreach Automation tool such as LeadConnect to see actual results.
Introduction to Lead Generation
KPIs enable you to keep a detailed track and record of your various email campaigns. When you keep track of the important email marketing kpis, it provides data required to make further changes to your email marketing strategy. If you want to be successful in the marketing field, you would want to be able to make changes to your kpis for email marketing as and when required. Before jumping into running your Email Marketing campaigns, here is something you need to know. You must ensure your email doesn’t land in the spam folder of your recipients. You can’t just start sending a large number of emails without getting yourself categorized as a spammer. If that happens, it negatively affects your kpis for email marketing.
As a marketer, you wouldn’t just want your email to get delivered to the correct email address but also to get delivered to their inbox. If your email isn’t being opened, all your hard work is going to waste which can also impact your email marketing kpis. For that purpose, you must get your email address warmed up properly before you begin. Doing so will also help you perform better on your kpis for email marketing. It means you should begin by sending a smaller number of emails and be gradual in increasing the number over some time to the level you would want.
Why Are KPIs for Email Marketing Important?
KPIs provide you with the standard that you can measure the current performance of your business. So you can understand if you are achieving your goals or not. If you are lacking in any field, you can work on improving in those aspects. Once you have started to run your email marketing campaigns, start monitoring email kpis. You must keep monitoring the required kpis for email marketing so that the cold outreach campaign brings in the necessary results and you can take your business to the next level. Here are 6 reasons why you should do so:
Maximize customer engagement
When you track email kpis, you get to understand what type of content works best for your target audience. Doing so lets you make the required changes to your cold outreach campaigns and create the type of emails that can attract the attention of your customers.
Improves Employee Performance
When you have clear and well-defined KPIs, your employees know how they are performing as individual employees and as a part of the larger team, department, and company. That leads to more motivated employees and a positive work environment for all.
Determine Areas for Improvement
Once you start to keep a watch on your kpis for email marketing, you can find what is not working. This helps you to make the needed changes to improve your cold outreach campaigns. Thus, you can understand if your various business strategies are effective.
Monitor Return on Investment (ROI)
You must put in time, money, and effort if you want your marketing strategy to be effective. By checking out on kpis email marketing can bring in good ROI and make it worth it. It helps to find out what areas are leading to a waste of money and make the effort to bring in the right changes.
Take Well-Informed Choices
Decision-making becomes more effective when the actual data from studying kpis for email marketing shows what you are doing right and what is not working properly. Using information enables you to create the type of emails that are more likely to reach out to customers.
Analyze Campaign Performance
You can measure and analyze the performance of your campaigns and find the opportunities you want to stay ahead of your competition and grow your business by tracking your email kpis.
What KPIs for Email Marketing Are Important?
If you wish to track your Email Marketing KPIs, it is crucial to focus on those that will provide value and enable you to achieve your goals. Though there can be many more indicators that you can track, only some would be worthwhile for you. Here are the 9 crucial KPIs that can help you to achieve your email marketing objectives.
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1) Delivery Rate
Emails getting successfully delivered to your recipient’s inbox means your message is more likely to reach your intended audience. All your effort in reaching out to your target market is of no use if your email lands in the spam folder. Here is how you can find the delivery rate of your campaigns:
Delivery Rate = (Number of Sends – Number of Bounces) / Number of Sends
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2) Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate
When you send any message to your customers, you would want them to share and forward it further so it can spread to more people. People are more likely to have a positive outlook toward your business if someone they trust has recommended it.
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3) EClick-Through Rate
Email Click-Through Rate refers to the number of instances where recipients of your emails have clicked on a button or link. A higher rate means your customers find your content to be engaging enough and the CTA is effective in getting your recipients to
Click-Through Rate = Links Clicks / Email Delivered
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4) Clicks by Link/URL
While getting clicks on your email always feels incredible, it could be due to your recipients clicking on unsubscribe, blocking your email address, or tagging it as a spammer. Or else, they could be missing out on clicking on the click you would like them to.
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5) Conversion Rate
Conversion here refers to any desired actions to be finished by your email recipients. It is best if you include only a single goal in an email. The conversion needn’t always be a sale, but can also include anything that you want to such as signing up on the website, registering for an event, or paying your business a visit in person.
Conversion rate = Number of actions completed/ Number of emails delivered.
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6) Overall ROI
This is the most important of all email kpis listed here. Since there is time, money, and effort spent, you need to find out how profitable the money invested in your email marketing campaigns has been. It can be easily calculated as per the formula.
ROI = Profit / Costs
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7) Subscriber List Growth and Trends
The success of your email marketing campaign can depend greatly on your subscriber list. Every month, your subscriber count will decline naturally. Thus, you will have to put in the effort to add in more. This is essential to make sure your cold outreach campaigns give the desired results. Hence it is necessary to keep track of the growth and sport any trends such as growth, decline, or stagnation which can impact other kpis for email marketing too.
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8) Bounce Rate by Bounce Type
When you send emails, you want them to make it in the inboxes of all recipients. But actually doing so can be very tough. That is because there will be some emails that will bounce. Here is how you can find out your Bounce Rate. When you send your emails,ut it is quite difficult to be able to do so. That is because there will be some emails that will bounce. Here is how you can find out your Bounce Rate.
Bounce Rate = Number of bounced emails / Number of emails sent
However, it is not enough to just know about the Bounce Rate. To better understand it, you need to find out its Bounce Type:
- 1) Hard Bounce
It results from sending emails to a non-existent, invalid, or wrong address or due to syntax error.
- 2) Soft Bounce
When the email address is valid but there is a temporary domain failure or the recipient’s inbox is temporarily inactive or full, it is known as a soft bounce.
- 3) Technical Bounce
These are due to data format, server, or network errors.
- 4) Block Bounce
These reasons include an authentication error, complaints, URL block, being blacklisted, or due to a complaint against your email address.
You can reduce your bounce rate by regularly checking if you are targeting the right audience. Also, you should validate your emailing lists to determine if the email addresses are valid or not.
- 1) Hard Bounce
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9) Unsubscribe Rate
While you will always want your subscribers to grow, you can expect some number of people to unsubscribe. It is necessary to keep track to ensure you can detect any trends.
Unsubscribe Rate = Number of Unsubscribed recipients / Total Emails delivered
Best Practices for Improving Your KPIs And Email Performance
You need to keep working on improving your email marketing kpis to be able to successfully reach out to your targeted recipients. For that, you should work on the following aspects:
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1) Determine your target audience
Selecting the correct recipients for your cold outreach campaigns is crucial to avoid being sent to the spam folder. When you send emails to people for whom it is not relevant, they would probably ignore or delete it. Or, they could choose to flag you as a spammer. If a sufficient number of people do so, you could end up being blacklisted If that happens, you could lose out on the potential of email marketing.
To avoid that, you must first warm up your inbox. Start off by gradually increasing how many emails you send. In doing so, you may be certain that Internet and email service providers (ESPs) will recognize you as a real person and not a spammer. Finding the right persons to address your emails to is the next thing to do. Research and create your ideal buyer persona and use the relevant filters to locate your target audience. Next, you need to validate the email addresses so that your emails reach actual people.
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2) Segment your emailing lists
Once you have a list of prospects and their email addresses ready, you need to work on segmenting them. Select the criteria that are important to your company. Once you’ve done that, it will be simpler for you to send them emails that are useful. If you succeed in doing that, your business could benefit as well. Location, activities, views, hobbies, habits, and demographic information are a few of the criteria you may use.
After finishing with segmentation, you will also have to monitor the data and keep on improving your email marketing kpis. That way, you would be able to make sure it remains relevant to your requirements. If you can ensure your emails are being sent to the appropriate audience, you can improve your email kpis easily.
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3) Personalize your emails
Next, you need to start working on the content of our cold outreach emails. You should be providing a personalized solution.Just add the generic first name and last name to a standard template. Avoid the temptation to write about the fantastic features of your product or service. Instead, focus on the particular way in which you can genuinely add value to them or resolve their pain points.
You will need to first research a bit about the prospect to find out how you can be useful to them. Sending personalized emails has been known to bring in the most revenue and engagement for your business. Doing so helps to increase engagement and improve customer relationships which bring in more revenue.
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4) Work on Subject Lines
While the entire content of your email is important, you must pay special attention to the subject line. This is because that is what first catches peoples’ attention and determines if they will even open the email or not. No matter how good is your email content, if your prospects ignore or delete your email, it is all of no use. Your subject line should be able to compel your recipients to open the email. It could be something that generates their curiosity, addresses their pain point, or provides them with something of value.
Since most email providers will reduce the subject line when displaying it on your prospect’s device, you have limited words to use. Keep it impactful and brief. Make it interesting, offer something of value, and personalize it. Avoid using misleading or spammy words as that can annoy your prospects and result in your email address getting tagged as spam or blacklisted.
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5) A/B Test your content
Once you have done creating content, the next step is to do A/B testing, also known as split testing to know what is more likely to perform better. This will boost your chances of achieving your email kpis. To perform the test, you divide your audience into 2 groups. Both groups are sent an email with minor changes. This process will enable you to find out what works. Select and test just one iteration through this method if you want to get the most out of it. You can test something else when you have a suitable result. Keep testing since there is always room for improvement.
To get the best results, you should analyze email marketing kpis such as open, click, and reply rates of the different iterations to know which one works better. Also, include a large set of people so you can get the insights you need. Some of the variables you can choose to conduct the A/B testing could be your subject line, email body, layout, designs, CTA, preview text, images, and the time to send your email.
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6) Follow up regularly
Some of your prospects will not respond to your emails even after your best efforts. They could have missed your email or may have forgotten about it. If you decide to give up on those prospects, it would reduce the potential business you could get. Also, likely, they have genuinely been unable to respond after receiving your initial email, and following up with them prompts them to do so. Otherwise, they would have never done so and that would have impacted your kpis for email marketing.
Sometimes, you may have to follow up multiple times before you get a response. However, always remember to not be pushy and annoying. Just like your earlier emails, remember to keep your content short, and simple. Ensure your follow-up seems connected to the earlier message. Add some value as you don’t know the exact reason behind them not responding to attract their attention.
How can LinkedIn boost your Email Marketing efforts?
LinkedIn has more than 930 million people on it spread over 200 countries and territories all over the world. By leveraging its potential, you can easily reach your kpis for email marketing. Even if you are a new or a small business, you can use LinkedIn to achieve your Email Marketing objectives.
Lead generation, relationship building, and lead nurturing become much easier with LinkedIn. You can get better results when you start to use personalization in your messages and reach your targeted audience. All of these can be possible especially if you can utilize a LinkedIn outreach automation platform, such as LeadConnect.
Conclusion
When you are measuring KPIs, email marketing efforts give better results. Without proper data, you will not understand what is working and not working. Thus your cold outreach decisions will not be backed by data and could be detrimental rather than productive for your business.
