We work with a number of clients in the financial services sector, helping them to plan, implement and evaluate successful email marketing campaigns. We have drawn on that experience to create a simple, effective guide aimed at financial services organisations that are looking to build a new campaign, or improve an existing one.
1) Understand your goals and document your strategy
It should go without saying that it is important to have clearly defined goals before undertaking any marketing campaign. But how many people actually spend time discussing and agreeing objectives and then put them into writing? You’ll be surpised how much this helps clarify your thinking and improves your implementation.
Make your goals measurable. With marketing budgets being squeezed, it is important that there is enough evidence that the campaign delivers an acceptable return on investment. If your company is spending £25 per lead with a lead broker, but your email marketing is generating leads at half the price you need to be able to demonstrate this with clear, reliable metrics.
Your email marketing software should give you a break down of open rates, bounces, unsubscribes and exactly which links within the email were clicked (if not, then look for an alternative). If used in conjuction with Google Analytics, you can track which of those ‘click-throughs’ resulted in conversions. If you are seeking completed mortgage enquiry forms, for instance, you should tag all links and setup goals in Analytics so you know exactly which emails, and which links within them, have resulted in leads, completed application forms, offers and completions. Ultimately, of course, the key metric to measure for all campaigns is cost of completion versus revenue earned to get the overall return on investment.
So you also need to make sure you have back office processes in place to accurately track which of the submitted enquiries have actually resulted in income. If you don’t, you’ll never know which campaigns actually give you the best return on your investment.
Largemortgageloans.com email campaign, created and managed by Dock9