It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day operations of your email marketing program—rushing to get the next campaign out. It’s hard work! But if you’re on auto-pilot, you might neglect several strategic and structural areas of your program. While your marketing technology stack is advancing with new features, your marketing programs might not be.
Sound familiar? If so, it’s time to conduct an audit of your email marketing stack. Here’s a checklist that can help you identify areas that may need attention.
The marketing technology landscape is constantly evolving. Not only are new offerings constantly coming to the market, but all your existing technologies are evolving as well. Assess these areas:
While marketing automation is a highly effective approach to campaign management, a “set it and forget it” mindset can be costly. Your automated campaigns are living and breathing campaigns that often impact your customers for years and typically generate high returns on investment (ROI). You need to regularly check on them. Here are some areas to evaluate:
Anytime your company updates the look and feel of its website or mobile app, that should automatically trigger a refresh of your email marketing creative. Beyond that, it’s important to implement updates that address email’s unique challenges and cater to your email subscribers’ needs. Consider the following:
Your audience will change and so will their behaviors. Keep a close eye on the performance of your campaigns and segments. Review these areas:
This email marketing audit checklist is exactly what we follow when working with our clients. We call it a Spotlight, and we find that clients who conduct them and act on the results perform significantly better over the next year.
For example, we used this email marketing audit approach to help a global telecommunications company make better use of their Eloqua platform and start work on implementing an account-based management (ABM) strategy. The audit identified several potential improvements, entailing database hygiene, data enhancement, lead score models, and reporting. In one case, there was a lead score model that hadn’t been reviewed in more than two years. It didn’t reflect their current campaign calendar nor the increase in web-based events. We restructured that model using a persona-based approach and it identified $4.2 million worth of new opportunities in just one month.
We also worked with a financial services company to do a performance analysis across customer campaigns at different stages in their lifecycle. We identified some simple improvements, including opportunities to use existing data to personalize campaigns. In total, the changes represented an estimated additional $7 million in program revenue, which the team is currently working toward.
Those are just two examples of the compelling results you can find when you take the time to do an annual email marketing audit. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of your program, but it’s important to make time for strategic reviews so you can continue to grow.
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Need help auditing your digital marketing program? Oracle Marketing Consulting has more than 500 of the leading marketing minds around the world ready to help you to achieve more with the leading marketing cloud, including Analytic & Strategic Services, Creative Services, and Performance Reporting Services teams to help you review your program, identify improvements, and help you execute them. To learn more, reach out to us at CXMconsulting_ww@oracle.com.
Sophie Haywood is the team lead for Strategic Services in the Australia-New Zealand region for Oracle Marketing Consulting. Her background includes over 10 years of client and agency consulting experience and 8 years in client-side marketing campaign management. Sophie is passionate about putting herself in the customer's shoes and using marketing technology to deliver a great customer experience. Her business acumen, empathy, and understanding of marketing processes are key to enabling clients to identify how to deliver their marketing vision through operational execution.
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