Data in Marketing: Quick Wins Using Your Email Data
This blog is part of our new series “Data in Marketing.” Each month, we’ll bring you fresh tips on leveraging your data to enhance and optimize your marketing work.
This month, in our “Data in Marketing” series, we’re talking about email data. Email data, you might ask, I haven’t heard JCA Arts Marketing discuss email before! Well, we’re now offering new Email & Marketing Automation Services to help you leverage your data and technology for effective email marketing.
To celebrate the launch of JCA Arts Marketing’s newest offering, we’re sharing some quick tips on how to use your email data to improve your strategy.
It can be hard to tell what data to look at first, so let’s start at the top: How can you tell whether your emails are reaching your intended audience with the tools you already have available to you?
1. Identify what email clients your patrons are using, and then review your emails on the most popular platforms
When you’re firing off emails week after week, it can be easy to forget that others may not see your emails the same way you do. The platform you work in (for example, Microsoft Outlook for Windows Desktop) may look very different from what your customers are seeing (e.g. the Apple Mail app on their iPhones).
Because office work is mostly done on desktop, there can be a bias against mobile friendly design, simply by the fact that we create and review emails on our computers. This is especially true if you’re a team that forwards an email draft for review to others—even if a team member revises an email on their phone, mobile readjustments are often lost when the email is forwarded.
If you’re a Prospect2 or WordFly user, find this data at the links below:
- Prospect2 Help Documentation: Getting the Most Out of Your Data – ActiveCampaign
- WordFly Help Documentation: Subscriber Insights – Help Center
- For other platform users, use your platform’s Help Documentation to find similar reports. If you’d like help finding this data, reach out to our team and we’ll be happy to help.
What to do with this data:
- Take a look at your last five emails through your most popular email clients.
- Note any design issues that aren’t working for certain email clients.
- Make the necessary changes to your template design.
2. Compare the number of emails signups against the number of unsubscribes
Even if your email signups are trending positively, it’s possible that the number of unsubscribes outweighs that growth. Over time, that’s fewer and fewer people you can engage. You want to make sure your list is growing. New purchasers are often a key medium for growth, but ideally you also have a strategy in place for patrons who are at the interest stage with your organization.
If you’re a Prospect2 or WordFly user, find this data at the links below:
- Prospect2: Contact trend report explained – ActiveCampaign Help Center
- WordFly: Insights | Subscribers
- For other platform users, use your platform’s Help Documentation to find similar reports. If you’d like help finding this data, reach out to our team and we’ll be happy to help.
What to do with this data:
- If your list is shrinking, consider adding an opt-down choice , which allows subscribers to get fewer emails, without entirely opting-out from your communications. One example: a monthly newsletter with a simple list of “What’s coming up next”.
- If you’d like to grow your list, create more opportunities on your website and in your venue for people to sign up. For example, you can add quick sign-up forms on production detail pages that ask “Want to be reminded about this event?”
3. Check your import error rates
Here’s one last easy, but crucial tip—check what percentage of your email addresses are resulting in errors when you attempt to import a list. During normal business activity, emails are often entered erroneously, even by the patrons themselves. Over time, this can amount to a large number of patrons who miss out on your communications. By checking this data, you can see how many people are being left off your emails and correct it.
If you’re a Prospect2 or WordFly user, find this data at the links below:
- Prospect2: Activity Log
- WordFly: Review subscribers who weren’t imported – Help Center
- For other platform users, use your platform’s Help Documentation to find similar reports. If you’d like help finding this data, reach out to our team and we’ll be happy to help.
What to do with this data:
- Firstly, import your whole subscriber list to see the full list of email errors. This should not replace your current list, but just be used for finding these errors.
- Here’s the less-fun part: you’ll need to spend some time correcting these in your CRM so they stop erroring out in imports.
- Then, create an ongoing process to monitor these errors and fix any that arise with each email you send. Once you complete the first step, this should be doable each week since you’ll only be catching new email errors.
Data-driven, effective email marketing support
Whether you’re implementing a new platform or want to enhance your email strategy and processes, we’re here to help. We’ll develop a roadmap for your email and marketing automation usage that supports your digital marketing initiatives and makes effective use of your people and technology.