Email Marketing: Taking Advantage Of Hubspot & Others To Grow Your Customer Base

Email marketing, to the uninitiated may look like an old-school type of online marketing with no result. Yes, it is an old-school form of online marketing but it's never a dying method much like the importance of emails. The beauty of email marketing is the fact that it is a highly efficient and cost effective method of communicating to potential and current customers. Instead of spending hours printing paper and sending them out to hundreds or even thousands of potential clients, email marketing slashes the time required and monetary cost for marketing.

Complementing the ease of business process on cost and effort is on how email marketing has evolved over the decades. An email marketer doesn't just send out emails in blind trust that someone might read them and get convinced to try or use the product/service offered. There are now advanced tools online marketers use to determine if their campaign has been successful or what are the factors that they need to improve on to gain more customers.

From the Basics to Complex Analysis

Email marketing companies such as Hubspot, MailChimp, MailerLite and Omnisend offer basic tools for analyzing the results of the latest email blast. The very basics are covered: the number of email received, opened as well as bad email addresses.

There is actually a very clever method employed in knowing if an email has been opened by a recipient. The email comes with a pixel-sized picture that loads when the email is opened. When the picture is loaded in the email (unseen by the reader), the sender receives a notification that the email has been read.

But opening and reading an email are just very simple metrics for an email marketer. For those who really want to know how their readers interact with the email, more information is needed.

The following are some of the very important metrics to consider for email marketing:

• Time of Interaction - a marketer has to know if the reader does the following actions in less than five seconds: check, open and close. If this is the basic interaction of most emails, it means that the readers are not hooked enough on their first impression of the email sent. An eight second threshold is considered a success since they did have time to browse through the email.
• Engagement and Click Through - A click through happens when the reader clicks on the link found inside the email which means the reader is interested in the message and would like to know more. Hubspot email marketing analysis tool has a feature where they can track if the email click through actually resulted in additional engagement.
• Open and Unsubscribe Rate - The percentage of emails opened should be analyzed and should not be immediately counted as a win. Why? An opened email could be immediately deleted as previously mentioned. But the worst thing that could happen is when the reader spends time reading the material and opted to unsubscribe. That is considered a lost sale altogether. Other metrics to look for: emails marked as spam, bounced.
• Sharing and Forward Percentage - Email marketing companies also have a feature that allows their email to be tracked when they are forwarded or shared to others. It's also a good idea to have a "share" button in emails especially when there's a social media context to the message.
• Return on Investment - This is actually the most important aspect of email marketing. Why spend on a marketing strategy that does not produce results? Compare the cost of marketing to the sales made through this type of marketing to determine if this is actually worth it or maybe some tweaks are needed to make the email more engaging and attract customers.

From Sales, Newsletter and Retention

The previously mentioned metrics are very important especially for sales type of email marketing. However, there are also other types of email marketing that focus on "soft sell" messages to their current and potential customers. Emails that contain newsletters and company updates/feedback are also other types of emails that need to be tracked and analyzed as much as possible. With the right email marketing tool, a company can take full advantage of this form of marketing to attract and retain the right type of customers in the long run.