Revitalise your CRM account

Want to start this year on the right foot? Auditing your CRM account is always a good idea and taking action at the beginning of the year will allow you time to plan your successes.

Why should you audit your email marketing?

Auditing your account will give you the foundations you need for growth and allow you to measure the performance of your current strategy. Not only does it show what you're currently doing well but also:

• Identifies areas of opportunity for this year
• Provides key learnings from what didn't work
• Allows you to make an action plan
• Test new strategies

For an effective review of your current email marketing account, you will want to cover four key areas of your strategy and access, analyse and identify key areas of opportunity. This includes the overall health and viability of your account, the methods you use to acquire new sign-ups and collect customer information, as well as your interactions with these profiles through flows and campaigns. 

Wait! Are you taking your overall business goals for the year into consideration? Before you start auditing your CRM account, ensure your business goals are clear so that you can prioritise any post-audit actions in line with them.

Account health and deliverability 

When looking into the health and deliverability of your account dig deep into metrics and industry benchmarks. It's easy to see when things are underperforming but make sure you don't forget to look into what is performing well and what opportunities this can provide for your strategy. 

Email metrics to review and benchmark:

• Open rate
• Click rate
• Click through rate
• Placed order rate
• Bounce rate
• Spam complaint rate
• Unsubscribe rate
• Failed deliveries (SMS)
• Failed reasons (SMS)

A few ways to improve and maintain email health and deliverability is to ensure you have a clean strategy. Ask yourself when reviewing your account - Is your approach well thought out and considered? How often do you clean your lists of suppressed profiles? Do you have a consistent and strategized campaign schedule? Are profiles given a clear way to unsubscribe? 

In addition to this, you can also:

• ID trouble ISPs
• Use a dedicated sending domain
• Use a trusted sending number (SMS)
• Use double opt-in  (SMS)
• Avoid sending during night time and use SMS quite times  (SMS)

Acquisition - Generating sign-ups from your eCommerce store

Look into your lead sources and their individual performance, are you optimising towards more volume or higher intent? This will impact the quality of your leads and should be considered when setting goals for your account.

Additionally:

• What is your form submission rate? And how does this differ based on your lead sources?
• Are sign-up forms adding profiles to the correct list?
• Are new sign-ups triggering the correct welcome series? Consider segmenting content based on the signup type.
• Is the correct consent being collected?

To improve these metrics you may want to A/B test different elements of your sign-up forms and lead sources to gather a better understanding of what works best for your audience.

 Lead generation A/B test options:

• Source
• High intent vs. low
• Form type
• Pop-up vs. flyout
• Display timing (keep content the same)
• Immediate vs. time delay vs. exit intent
• Signup offers
• % off vs. $ off
• Smaller vs. larger discount
• Free gift vs. free shipping

Forms can be used for more than just collecting email sign-ups and have endless possibilities in optimising your data collection goal. Some of these ways are:

• Multi-step forms - collect phone numbers, birthdays, etc
• Leverage hidden fields
• Separate contest/giveaway forms from generic sign ups
• Fly out forms for new launches or flash sales with timers etc
• Quiz's to help personalise content

Flows - Email automation to drive revenue and maintain engagement

To ensure you are taking acquired profiles successfully through the correct stages of the funnel, map out your email flows and ensure they cover all touchpoints a user may have on your website. Alongside optimising your current flows to be as effective as possible, create new ones and make sure content is tailored based not only on the funnel stage but also on the segments you are targeting.

Email automation by funnel stage:

• Awareness (welcome series)
• Consideration (browse abandonment)
• Purchase (post-purchase instructions)
• Retention (upsell, cross-sell, win-back)
• Advocacy (loyalty and birthday)

Email flow A/B test options:

Build on your flow strategy further with a/b testing to pinpoint what makes your recipients engage the most…

• Marketing Channel
• Email vs SMS performance
• Content
• Use of images
• Brand tone
• Customer experiences
• Shorter vs. longer flow series
• Order of messages 

Campaigns - Email & SMS

Review your past and present campaigns and benchmark performance metrics to gain insight into what is/isn't working and why. You should regularly review campaign performance to continue optimising your strategy for the best results, alongside continual a/b testing to gain a deeper understanding and data.

When creating an email campaign you should consider:

• Subject line
• Send time
• Content
• Email design
• CTA
• Audience and segmentation

Gain further insight and inspiration for your campaign (and flow) emails by looking into your competitor's mailing lists and brands outside of your industry for a fresh perspective. In addition, there are many platforms out there such as Klaviyo Showcase, which shares high-performing emails and SMS campaigns for inspiration.

Also, consider who your content is tailored for and how you wish to segment your profiles for optimal performance and measurement.

Advanced email database segmentation techniques:

• Customer behaviour (product interest, marketing engagement)
• First-party data (location, survey responses, preferences)
• Predictive analytics (expected date of next order, predicted CLV)
• Evaluate segment performance (audience breakdown)

What's next?

So.. you’ve audited your account, now to put all of those learnings into action! Once your account has been sufficiently audited:

• Review your deliverability metrics & implement best practices.
• Test all of your acquisition sources & level up your sign-up forms
• Ensure you have flows set up for each stage of the buying journey.
• Evaluate the success (and failures) of previous campaigns and learn from them.

By conducting regular audits of your email marketing account, you can stay on top of your overall performance, identify key areas for improvement, and ensure the success of your campaigns and automation. Start today and take the first step towards a more effective eCommerce email marketing strategy.