Email marketing and customer journeys are like peanut butter and jelly. The two entities are effective on their own, but when used together, they can create magic.
The synergy between email marketing and customer journeys is powerful. Without customer journeys, an email marketing strategy isn’t as effective at driving sales and increasing customer lifetime value. At the same time, without an email marketing strategy, customer journeys aren’t as efficient at persuading buyers to make a purchase.
Your email marketing statistics are the secrets to improving your customer journey. Being able to see the statistics of your mailings gives you a better idea of who your customer is, what they like, and how you should market to them. With these insights, you can expect their needs, follow trends, and go deeper into the details of their demographics. This results in creating a more tailored customer journey that bumps up customer engagement levels.
Let’s take a closer look at how email marketing statistics are influencing customer journeys.
What is a Customer Journey?
A customer journey is a series of interactions that a customer has with a brand over time. From the moment that someone hears about your product or service, they enter into a journey that will either end in them buying your product or becoming a long-term customer. Each interaction builds upon the previous one and creates an impression of your brand in the customer’s mind. The experience your brand delivers through its content and communications is what keeps them engaged or drives them away.
This customer journey map shows the simple, easy-to-follow blueprint that allows businesses to visualize the best possible experience for their customers.
Customer journey serves as an outline for marketers to consult when designing, developing, and targeting their strategies. Most of all, establishing a customer journey map forces businesses to take a step back and see the bigger picture. Since these maps are focused entirely on the user’s needs, they reveal the areas where users run into snags so you can create solutions for those problems. This allows brands to keep the customer at the forefront of their priorities.
As customers go through the stages of their journey, they’re influenced by each touchpoint that occurs. It’s up to you to ensure you’re ready for these moments and able to influence them in the right way. A well-executed journey can bring in new business and create brand evangelists who are eager to praise your brand everywhere they go.
How Customer Journey and Email Marketing Metrics Intersect
Now that you’re familiar with the “customer journey”, try giving it a twist by viewing your customers’ path through your email marketing tactics. When you analyze your customers’ journey through the lens of email marketing campaigns, you can figure out which content and follow-up messages they need at different stages of their relationship with your business.
Email marketing can be an effective tool for helping consumers move through the different stages of the purchase process. But a great email marketing campaign is more than just a series of pre-written emails. It’s understanding your customers and giving them what they want. It’s knowing who they are and how they interact with your brand. It’s what their behavior tells you about how they’d like to be marketed to. Combining all these metrics with your customer’s journey can do wonders in nudging them down the path to purchase.
Take a look at Runkeeper’s email newsletter example. Runkeeper is a tool that helps runners keep track of their runs. The brand uses email marketing and behavioral analysis to personalize the customer journey. Understanding what motivates its audience, the brand sends relevant messages to draw in lost prospects.
Another winning example comes from Fender’s Mod Shop. This email from their repository features an unfinished guitar design that the customer had been working on. It’s a cleverly personalized campaign that helps re-engage customers.
Email Marketing Metrics You Must Measure for Your Customer Journeys
The customer journey is full of twists, turns, distractions, and more distractions. To successfully get your point across, you have to get a little inventive. Email marketing metrics help you in learning where customers are joining the journey and where they’re disengaging.
These metrics are an excellent way to learn about your customers. The more you know about your customers and their preferences, the better you can ensure that all of your messaging hits home. So, let’s get down to the key metrics you should be measuring for your customer journey.
Open Rate
The open rate is the percentage of people who click on your email to read its contents. Naturally, people who open your emails are more likely to act on the content than people who don’t. So, when open rates are low and engagement is lacking, you’ve got to make changes to your strategy. Take a hard look at everything from the subject line to design.
Click-through rates
Click-through rate is a crucial email marketing metric. It reflects the number of people who clicked on links in the emails. A high click-through rate means you have a well-written subject line, engaging content, or even an offer that’s too good to pass up. This metric can help you identify what customers are interested in, allowing you to keep them engaged. This report helps you track the success of specific links and also see which creative content drives your most engaged audience members.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate of a campaign is the number of people that click on a link and then complete an intended action. It helps you understand which types of links within your message are more likely to engage your customers. This data also helps you gauge whether a call to action was effective or not. Conversion rate ultimately aids in improving campaign performance, just as it does with paid ads.
Unsubscribe Rate
Unsubscribe rate is the percentage of customers who choose NOT to receive future emails from you. Safe to say, low unsubscribe rates are vital for consistent growth. If there’s an increase in your unsubscribe rate, it means that people aren’t responding to your campaign. In that case, you should take a second look at your subject lines and content to see if there’s a problem.
Click-to-open rate
The click-to-open rate indicates the chances of your emails being opened. It is a comparison between how many times an email was opened and how often it was clicked. Emails with a high click-to-open rate provide marketers with better feedback on the effectiveness of their content. This metric shows that recipients found the email interesting and inspiring enough to open and read it. It doesn’t matter whether or not they took any action; the most important thing is that they kept your message in front of them long enough to decide what to do next.
List Growth Rate
Active subscribers on your email list are an invaluable asset, but they’re certainly not a static one. Your email marketing database decays by about 22.5% every year. Every day, your subscribers are dwindling and you’re losing potential customers. It might seem little at first, but this small decrease can drastically reduce the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. That’s why it’s important to pay attention to your contact list and grow your subscriber base regularly.
Spam Complaint Rate
A spam rate is the number of people who reported email as spam out of the total number of messages you have sent. As the sender, you need to know whether recipients are okay with receiving your messages. Customers’ decision to report emails is one of the most worrying situations for businesses. If it continues for a long time, you can risk running into deliverability issues that might prove difficult to fix.
Engagement Over Time
Timing is crucial when it comes to email marketing. Customers who receive their messaging at the right time are more likely to respond, click through, or buy. Thanks to customer engagement data, you can see when your customers tend to open your emails. As you assess this information over time, you’ll come upon an email schedule that blasts messages at the most effective time slots. This way, you can send the right email at the right time of day, maximizing the response rate.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate isn’t directly tied to the company’s goals, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important. If you have too many hard bounces, your company may not be seen as a reputable email sender. When emails bounce back and trip ISP’s filter, you can end up losing customers and money — and risking a lot of headaches in the process.
Every Email Marketing Statistic Tells a Story
Email campaigns help you identify patterns in your customers’ interactions in terms of email marketing metrics.
When put together, email statistics can give you the perfect formula for personalizing your customer journey. With this data, you can begin building a cohesive picture of your customers’ behavior.
From there, it’s easy to figure out how they behave in the future and tailor your customer journey to best suit their needs.
All of which culminates in more personalized customer journeys that will take your engagement game to the next level.