The Inbox Experience

In an earlier edition, I talked about how the marketing word of the year is Experiences. They don't have to be elaborate or high budget; consumers' small, frequent interactions with your brand are micro-experiences and should be positive. And email is one of them!

Email marketing, done correctly, is one of the most effective channels to engage and convert consumers. Yet it is one area I have consistently seen shortfalls in or shortcuts being taken to achieve KPIs. 

First off, let's establish some basic email marketing KPIs:

• Subscriber growth

• Deliverability: percentage of emails that end up in people's inboxes (i.e. not spam or bounce back).

• Open rate

• Engagement: Click Rate

• ROI: is the investment (tech and human resources) paying off?

The fate of email marketing depends on a quality list

Have you ever unsubscribed to something, yet continue receiving emails from that company? Or worse, have you ever been added to a mailing list without your consent? Not only is it frustrating as a user to constantly have to deal with this mailbox intrusion, but it's also against best practices to use tactics like that to maintain a growing subscriber list (and please, don't buy email lists from data scrapers).  

The success of email marketing starts with building a quality list. And how you go about doing it will have a knock-on effect on the rest of your KPIs. I've witnessed firsthand how expensive email marketing becomes with a bad list.

To grow subscribers, you need to: