Email technology has evolved considerably over the years. The first email program was developed at MIT back in 1965, long before the existence of big data. However, big data is changing the future of email in countless ways.
One of the biggest developments is with email marketing. Data analytics is changing the future of email marketing.
What is the Future of Email Marketing in a World Shaped by Big Data
You wouldn’t run PPC ads unless you knew the conversion rate, right? New big data developments are making it easier for companies to get the highest ROI from their marketing budgets.
Liga Bizune is a renowned data analytics expert that has written about the benefits of big data in email marketing. Bizune said that there plenty of benefits of big data in the email marketing profession.
However, marketers need to understand the changes they need to make to get the greatest benefit from it. They need to stop sending cold emails until they have good metrics. A data mining algorithm can be useful for brands that want to see how customers are responding to their campaigns.
However, you need to make sure that you use the right metrics in your email marketing campaigns. Reliable and accurate statistics are essential to cold emailing campaigns. In addition, there are four important metrics in particular that you need to be using.
These are not the only metrics you can use, but they are the ones you need to know before any others.
Why You Need Good Data
If you operate your business blind, you’ll soon fall into a ditch. In other words, you need data to know where you are and where you’re going.
Emphasis on “good.” You need accurate statistics.
And when you have reliable metrics, you’ll be able to notice how it benefits your business. The upsides of good data include:
- You can be more decisive and have more confidence that you’re making the right decisions.
- You’ll be more productive and waste less time doing something that isn’t working.
- Your target audience will be much more well defined, which is essential to successful marketing and sales operations.
- You won’t miss opportunities that you wouldn’t have known about if you didn’t have good data.
These benefits are obvious. Therefore, it is not surprising that 25% of businesses are leveraging their data.
The Essential Metrics To Know For Cold Emailing
There are four big pieces of data you need to become familiar with if you want a successful cold email campaign. I’ll go through each one below.
Open rate
The open rate of your cold emails tells you how good your subject line was, or if you might have gotten flagged for spam.
If recipients are compelled by your subject line or are overwhelmed by it, it’s going straight to the trash. And if you include a lot of links (or even just one) in your email, many spam filters won’t show it to the recipient.
If your open rate is poor, your campaign will go nowhere.
Adjusted reply rate
The adjusted reply rate is the number of responses you get compared to the number of opened emails. It’s better than just looking at the regular reply rate because it gives you the percentage of openers who responded.
The ARR gives you some needed context. Let’s say you only get 10 replies, which doesn’t sound like a lot. But if you had only sent 10 emails, then 10 replies is amazing, compared to if you had sent 100 emails.
Positive reply rate
This one is a bit more difficult to track, but it’s very important. Getting a response isn’t automatically good news. If people reply with complaints of spam-like content or that your email felt spammy, that’s really bad.
However, it’s important to harness the positive responses and make those experiences as productive as possible. The focus of cold emailing is to have a positive interaction and to start a conversation, so make sure you do that with as many of the positive replies as possible.
Bounce rate
Bounces happen for a couple of reasons. It could be that the recipient’s inbox is full or that you sent an email that spam filters are flagging. Regardless of the age of your campaign, you can still have emails bounce. Ideally, your bounce rate should be under 5%. Knowing this metric is helpful because you can then remove the undeliverable email addresses.
Good Statistics Start With Good Leads
The best way to have a good open rate, adjusted reply rate, positive reply rate, and a low bounce rate is to start with good leads. Solid leads are the foundation of your entire outreach campaign.
But where do you find good leads?
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the best tool for finding the right leads for your campaign. It’s a premium account with an arsenal of tools, the most compelling of which is the Advanced Search.
This feature lets you find professionals on LinkedIn based on very specific qualities. Then, using a LinkedIn email finder, you can easily export the email addresses in bulk.
You can filter your search results by:
- Keywords
- Job function and title
- Location
- Industry
- Company size
- LinkedIn posts 30 days or younger
- Shared experiences
- Boolean search parameters (“and” / “or” / “not”)
- And more…
Finding people based on these factors will give you a much better shot at having great metrics. Build your cold email campaign on strong leads and it will be hard to fail.
There are plenty of other metrics that can be useful when cold emailing, but these four are the most important. You need these ones if you want to run a successful outreach campaign.
Big Data is the Key to Successful Email Marketing Campaigns
There are plenty of benefits of big data in email marketing. You need to take advantage of new data analytics tools to get the most value of your email marketing strategy.