As a marketing channel, email has received more than its fair share of flak for being too easy to ignore and be regarded as spam. However, it remains one of the most effective ways of driving customer engagement and repeat sales. Targeted email campaigns can be described as the digital equivalent of personalized customer experience management.

By tracking the amount of engagement generated by your email marketing campaigns, you can get vital clues into customer behavior, enabling you to engage your audience proactively. For example, if the unsubscribe rate has been increasing steadily, it is a sign that a growing number of customers may be gravitating away from your brand.

Most online businesses focus their email tracking and analysis efforts at the top of the marketing funnel in a bid to acquire new customers. That is not surprising given the fact that 44% of all businesses focus more on acquiring new customers than retaining existing ones. However, by focusing on the post-purchase experience, online brands can greatly increase their Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) at a fraction of the cost of attracting new customers. Email tracking is an excellent way of mapping the customer experience which can directly translate into new opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling across various touchpoints.

There are a number of email tracking tools available that can help you track and analyze the click-through rate (CTR) or conversion rate of your email campaigns. Boomerang is a great tool. For small online businesses, tools like Aweber or MailChimp can also provide customer email management and tracking functions. What’s more, the latest CRM tools come with in-built email tracking features that help you stay on top of your marketing campaigns. However, just sending and tracking emails isn’t enough. The first step is to work out the right strategy!

5 Email Tracking Strategies You Should Be Using

Here are 5 ways in which you can leverage email tracking to create an engaging customer experience:

1. Customer Segmentation

Not all email marketing messages grab a reader’s attention in the same way. This is because a customer may not perceive an offer as relevant to his/her specific needs, depending on the stage of the customer journey they may be at. The key to creating engagement and conversion with email outreach is to create customer segments according to demographic characteristics like age, income, and purchase history and whether they are a new or repeat customer.

Once the email copy and layout has been finalized, it is recommended to A/B test different variations that can be sent at different times of the day. It is equally important to be clear on your outcomes for the campaign: open rate, click-through rate, or conversion rate.

After a span of about a week, analyze the results to identify any trends that could be incorporated into the next set of emails you may have planned. Segmentation can help you get a better understanding of your audience’s biggest pain points and personalize your pitch for better engagement.

For example, a 10% discount offer may work better for old customers who may be considering switching to a different brand than for a loyal customer who spends more than $500 per month with your store.

Also read: ActiveCampaign vs tinyEmail: Which is the better option?

2. Personalization

A major reason for poor email open rates is because brands fail to “speak the same language” as the target customer. Email tracking can help you focus on clients that regularly open your emails and are most likely to buy from you as opposed to those who are largely non-responsive. What’s more, by tracking the exact link that a recipient clicks on, you can get valuable insights into his or her buying motives and even the best time of day for your customer support team to follow-up.

It can also help you validate new product ideas or upsell value-added products based on how many times a recipient clicks on your email. By being responsive to subtle changes in customer behavior, you can get better engagement from your email marketing efforts. You may even be able to generate a significant increase in average order size and cart abandonment rates significantly over a period of time.

3. Mobile-first approach

It is a known fact that smartphones are quickly replacing desktop devices as the preferred medium of communication and web browsing. This means online brands design elegant emails that are optimized for smartphones. Email tracking tools let you discover the exact type of device used by consumers to open your emails. From a customer experience perspective, this is a priceless nugget of information that can affect your ROI in the long run.

4. Consistent Style of Communication

If your email marketing messages are not getting the response you want, your style of communication may have something to do with it. The reason: regardless of whether you optimize your emails for mobile or online channels, customers will always perceive your business as a single brand. To drive customer experience, it is important to have a standard tone of voice that is clear, engaging, and consistent. Based on the customer data collected by your CRM, develop a documented customer communication style guide for your marketing team to follow when creating an email copy.

Regardless of whether you optimize your emails for mobile or online channels, customers will always perceive your business as a single brand.

5. Leverage Analytics to Drive ROI

From Csat Surveys to CRM data, a typical customer support team will have access to plenty of customer data that can be supplemented by email tracking. Analyzing this data can help your brand build context into your marketing, leverage paid ads for retargeting customers with abandoned carts, and reduce customer churn.

Last words

An email campaign will only yield the desired results when your customer support team can effectively capitalize on the upselling and cross-selling opportunities generated by it. This can be a challenge when your budget limitations do not allow you to invest in a full-fledged customer support team of your own. Given the opportunity cost, choosing an experienced outsourced customer support provider can be an affordable yet highly effective alternative.

Helplama enables you to build a world-class customer support team without the added burden of hiring and training. Our Zero-Risk policy provides you with complete freedom from long term contracts, meaning unmatched flexibility for a startup or small business. Contact us today for more information!