Email marketing is extremely effective, with an ROI of up to $45 for every $1 spent.
Though it’s obviously effective, you may be unsure if your business is large enough to justify the cost of an email database and the marketing automation that comes with it.
Creating and managing an email database involves a lot of time and effort, which might make it seem like it’s not worth it. If you’re satisfied running a very small business or don’t plan to do much email marketing, you could be right.
However, if you feel like your business is on the cusp of expansion and are looking for a way to trigger that, learning how to use an email database could be the spark you’re looking for.
To decide, you’ll need to know the benefits of email databases, including how you can use them to grow your business.
Key Takeaways:
- An email database is a critical piece of any automated email marketing strategy and a useful tool even if you aren’t using automation.
- No matter the size of your business, you may benefit from the increased personalization enabled by a strong email database.
- There are great tools available, like MXTR’s automation platform, to help you massively scale your email marketing efforts and keep better track of your email database.
What Is an Email Database?
An email database is a tool for keeping track of customer emails and associated information like name, demographics, and purchase history.
An email database is an essential piece of an automated email marketing strategy, like the one described in this video by Davie Fogarty:
Email databases are compiled by collecting customer information through lead capture forms and other direct methods. For example, you may gate some “free” content behind an email capture form. Alternatively, you could ask for customers’ emails as they checkout.
How to Know If You Need an Email Database
It’s possible to improve your marketing efforts with an email database regardless of the size of your business. This is because, besides helping you scale your email marketing efforts, a properly managed email database will also help you segment customers and advertise to them more effectively.
Still, if you don’t plan to use automated email marketing, you may not think an email database is worth it.
Here are three questions to ask yourself before deciding whether you need an email database:
1. Do You Plan to Design Personalized Marketing Emails?
Source: Campaign Monitor
The main draw of email marketing over other forms of advertising is the conversational style. If you nail personalization, you’ll nail a connection and be well on your way to securing that customer.
After capturing email data using any method you choose, the process of designing personalized marketing emails becomes much easier with a good email database.
A properly managed email database will allow you to:
- Sort leads by how likely you believe they are to pay for your service in the future and design personalized marketing that focuses on the best prospects
- Segment all the emails of customers who have already bought from you into one pool and advertise to them directly
- Design email marketing for customers you believe are less likely to buy, ensuring that the ones who do become interested are seeing content relevant to them. An example of this would be a discount for first-time buyers
These are simple examples, but they are just the surface of an ocean of possibilities that a strong email database can unlock for you.
2. Do You Need a Better Way to Keep Track of Email Marketing Effectiveness?
A key piece of any email marketing strategy is how well you’re adjusting to the results.
You may be confident that the emails you’re sending are getting your message across, but are your click-through rates justifying that confidence?
An email database can help you know for sure by tracking important metrics such as:
- Email Delivery Rate: You need to know if your emails are being delivered and to frequently delete bunk email addresses from your list.
- Open Rate: How often do recipients actually open your emails? A low open rate will negatively impact your engagement ratio – a key metric email services use to determine spam.
- Unsubscribe Rate: This is important for determining if you’re marketing to the right people, as well as how effective your email subject lines are.
- Click-Through Rate: A low click-through rate could indicate that your email marketing content is not high quality. Improving copy is one simple way to boost your email marketing effectiveness.
Here are some more email marketing metrics and how often they’re tracked:
Source: Litmus
3. Are You Having Trouble Keeping Your Customer Emails Organized and Up to Date?
Without an email database, you risk having data that isn’t well structured, out of date, or incorrect.
You need to scrub your list to get rid of customers who aren’t opening emails. This will increase your engagement ratio and make it easy to design great marketing campaigns.
This may all be obvious. What’s not obvious is how exactly to do this regularly without investing a ton of time and resources on a painstaking data integrity check once or twice per year.
That’s where an automated email database can come to the rescue. A great email database means spending far less time worrying about the integrity of your email list and more time figuring out how to make that list work for you.
MXTR’s Automation Platform Combines Email Databases and Marketing into One
MXTR’s automation platform is your one-stop shop for all your email database, management, and marketing needs.
We make it easy to:
- Respond to captured leads in seconds using powerful automated tools
- Turn huge amounts of raw customer data into useful information
- Track how well your email marketing is performing so you’re always getting one step closer to complete optimization
- Save time and effort keeping your data up to date and accurate
- Shorten your sales cycles and improve customer lifetime value by creating better customer experiences through personalized email marketing.
MXTR can easily integrate into any existing technology stack. This is because we pride ourselves on partnering with our clients and designing automation packages that suit their unique needs.
We aren’t satisfied with selling you a one-time product and wishing you well. We’ll work alongside you to support your business needs and grow together.
Request a demo today to scale your email marketing efforts.
