Beyond open rates: new email marketing goals for maximum impact

Why start from a specific goal?

You are working on hundreds of things throughout the year: writing product descriptions, blogs and newsletters, drawing up social media posts, and so on.

Without goals, however, it is hard to set exact priorities to know what is most useful to spend time on.

By starting from a strategy, you can set goals per month or per quarter with the related tasks to achieve those goals. This is how you avoid the shiny object syndrome.

1. You know exactly what you have to do per day or per week to get to what you want to have accomplished at the end of the year.
2. Throughout the year, you can monitor your progress critically.
3. It helps you take decisions and prioritise decisions.

The problem with trite objectives

Mostly, you use conventional things we are all familiar with to make it more concrete, such as making open rates, click rates or general conversions increase or making your databases grow.

Of course, this helps you keep an eye on whether you are doing the right thing, but these figures do not go beyond KPIs. This is too limited. By focusing on metrics so strongly, you forget the general reading experience of your target group or what has actually the biggest impact on these figures.

Furthermore, these figures can be easily abused – albeit unintentionally – such as the use of manipulative subject lines or preheader text to increase the open rates, or the use of multiple calls to action to get more clicks.

By only focusing on these figures, you get a ‘false’ sense of improvement while actually disregarding the total use experience.

This could lead to poor email design, irrelevant content and a lack of personalisation.

Another problem with focusing on statistics is that these do not take the total customer journey into account. A high open rate does not necessarily lead to a high conversion rate, and focusing on one statistic may distract you from looking at the bigger picture. What is more, focusing on statistics alone may cause the long-term relationship with the customer to be neglected and could lead to a focus on short-term gains instead.

As a result of merely focusing on statistics, the importance of data privacy may get neglected, which may lead to sending irrelevant and undesired emails to your recipients. This could result in a high unsubscription percentage and could harm the reputation of your business.

An alternative approach

Long term

Long-term goals are rather focused on what type of business you want to run. You do not need to know all the details yet. This is about your current problems and challenges. How much time do you want to spend on something? What is the message you want to get across to your readers? What is the type of customer you would prefer to serve – or that would bring in the highest yield? Later on, you can translate this into specific objectives.

Stick around for some further examples.

Short term

Short-term goals are very tangible. You can achieve them in a month, or in a year at most. From short-term goals you can derive tasks directly. You want to support your sales team in qualifying leads, for instance, so that they can focus on the customers with the highest chance of success. From this, you could derive specific subtasks.

Use levels

In many cases, you can split the larger whole into specific domains, like customer retention, impact, financial parts, creation goals, or goals related to target groups.

Sustainable objectives

What could these specific objectives be?

What should you pay attention to?

When setting your objectives, you have to look beyond your KPIs. What is behind your challenge? Take the following into account:

Focus on the customer journey

Look further than your opens and clicks and look critically at your readers’ general experience, as from the moment they receive your email until they take action. This may range from improving your subject line and making your email more legible on mobile devices to creating stronger content that really sticks with your readers. Put yourself in your readers’ place and ask yourself what effect your content has on them.

Measuring and evaluating

It is important to think in advance about how to measure progress, even if you use this alternative approach. This means that you are going to collect figures and that you will use this data to make informed decisions about what works and what does not work. Additionally, you should look at your entire email marketing strategy critically and regularly. Which emails are doing fine and which emails are unsuccessful, and why?

Conclusion

So let’s get started. What is your current challenge, and how can you use your email marketing to improve this challenge? Although it is important to set specific measurable goals for your email marketing efforts, it is also important to reconsider assumptions and look critically at what you actually want to achieve.

Focus on a positive experience, build a relationship, and put yourself in your recipient’s place.

In this way, you can work actively on improving your results and on building a more effective strategy.