Email marketing: what it is and how to implement it

 What to consider when calculating the effectiveness of a campaign, an overview of channels, and a scheme for developing a digital strategy.

Organization of effective digital marketing management

Most of today's companies invest in online advertising. Even if the only promotion channel is an Instagram account, it takes an employee time to maintain it, and the company directly or indirectly still bears the costs. Given the multimillion-dollar budgets for digital, you need to clearly understand how high results advertising brings. We will consider this issue in more detail in the article.

The effectiveness of Internet marketing refers to the return on investment in it. The higher it is, the more profit advertising brings in comparison with how much is spent on it. Unfortunately, evaluating its effectiveness, entrepreneurs often make mistakes. Conventionally, they can be called "rookie mistakes" and "expert mistakes".

"Rookie mistake" Entrepreneurs are often excellent at understanding their own product and managing their business but have a poor understanding of internet marketing. Such businessmen consider effective advertising the one that brings 100, 1000, 500,000 sales. That is, they choose compliance with their expectations as a criterion of effectiveness and not the results of a study of the real market situation and the potential of the digital tools involved. And when the marketing channel used does not bring the planned sales volume, then it is considered ineffective, although it is likely that it has worked to the limit of its capabilities.

"Expert Error" Specialists easily operate with reductions in LTV, CR, CPA, CPO, CAC, and CTR, but often “they don’t see the forest for the trees”: advertising must pay off. The main goal of marketing is not to increase the CTR of ads in the search engine or, for example, not in a 2% conversion in a purchase on the site, but in the most efficient operation of each advertising channel that provides the company with income. The above indicators are just additional tools with which you can optimize your promotion.

It is necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing taking into account the return on investment indicator ROMI (Return On Marketing Investments) for advertising in general and for its specific tools, in particular, including individual metrics for each of them.

ROMI is calculated using the following formula:

ROMI = (advertising revenue - ad spend) / ad spend * 100%

If this indicator exceeds 100%, then advertising is considered to be paying off.

Digital advertising channels and their importance in the overall effectiveness

Any marketing channel can be calculated according to the following important economic metrics.

CPC (Cost Per Click) is the cost of getting a user to go to a website or mobile app. This indicator is often considered an additional one in dynamic ad optimization (you should strive to reduce it).

CPL (Cost Per Lead - price of a lead) - the cost of attracting a real client from any advertising channel. This indicator needs to be measured against information about the average check and LTV to understand how acceptable the current CPL is for the business.

LTV (Lifetime Value - profit for the entire time of the "life" of the client) is the total income from all orders made by one buyer for the entire period of his cooperation with the company.

Next, let's look at the main advertising channels and their indicators.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This is a set of measures to refine the site to promote it in the search results for thematic user requests. SEO includes a large number of works: developing new pages, filling them with products, optimizing headings, meta tags, text, photo, and video content, etc. The main indicators for measuring the effectiveness of this channel are:

• the amount of organic traffic from search engines;
• position in the search results for key queries for the company and visibility in the semantic core;
• CTR (Click-Through Rate - clickability) on the search;
• CR (conversion rate) of traffic from search engines to orders.

Contextual advertising. This is a paid placement of advertisements (texts and banners) in search results and on Yandex and Google partner sites. If SEO by investment can then drive traffic for a long time after funding ends, contextual advertising only works if there are sufficient funds in the account for impressions. This tool is highly flexible, with the ability to quickly set up and change ads quickly. The main indicators of the effectiveness of contextual advertising include:

• number of clicks;
• number of impressions;
• CTR (click-through rate);
• CR (conversion rate) of traffic from ads to orders.

Criteria such as the involvement of the target audience (located in the statistics counters), the percentage of bounces, the depth of browsing, and the time spent by the user on the promoted web resource are also of great importance. They indirectly determine the quality of the attracted target audience: the fewer bounces and the greater the depth and time of viewing, the more engaged and convertible users come from ads.

SMM (Social Media Marketing). A set of measures to promote the brand in social networks, solving several problems at once - from the actual sale of the product to the systematic improvement of the attitude of users to the organization. Basically, SMM is about supporting the company's public community and filling it with content, as well as interacting with users in public comments and private messages.

Key indicators of SMM:

1. to study the dynamics of subscriptions - the number of subscriptions and unsubscribes, views of publications, growth rate, and audience coverage;
2. to evaluate the feedback - Love Rate and Talk Rate (likes and comments in terms of the size of the audience), distribution rate (the number of actions "Share" performed in terms of the number of publications), engagement rate ER (Engagement Rate);
3. to evaluate traffic and its conversion - CTR of links to the site, the number of users attracted from social networks, their conversion into orders, and cost per lead (CPL).

Certain indicators in SMM should be selected taking into account marketing tasks. Setting the maximum bar for all metrics at once is illogical since they are achieved in different ways.

Targeted advertising. This is advertising in social networks, shown to users according to some target attribute (gender, age, location, interests, etc.). Targeted ads, unlike contextual ads, are more personalized and more closely match the psychological profile and needs of a potential client.

Targeting is evaluated according to the following criteria:

• by impressions;
• coverage (number of users who saw the advertisement);
• frequency of impressions (how many times the ad was seen by 1 person);
• clicks;
• CTR
• CPC (Cost Per Click), etc.

SERM (Search Engine Reputation Management). This is a set of tools to improve the reputation of the organization in the network. SERM includes working with reviews on well-known review sites and interacting with users on behalf of the organization.

The most important indicator of SERM performance is Ex (company reputation index in search engines). It is determined by the number of mentions of the organization on the Internet, the number of positive and negative reviews, and the mood of the pages where user opinions are published. It also takes into account the position of the page with comments in the search engine results and the chances that the user will click on it.

Additional digital marketing channels

We will study the tools below separately since they attract buyers indirectly, but the costs for them must also be taken into account in the payback calculation.

Web analytics. Analysis of the effectiveness of marketing channels should be carried out regularly, so many companies have a full-time analyst or seek help from agencies - in both cases, this work must be paid. A web analyst not only looks for problems with advertising tools but also analyzes the convenience of a website or corporate applications from a user's perspective (UI/UX analytics).

Web development. Landing pages for receiving advertising traffic are most often placed on the site. Therefore, they often have to be changed to meet the rules of search engines and the expectations of the target audience. Web development is a very important part of your overall marketing strategy.

Scheme for developing an effective digital marketing strategy

Consider how to rationally develop an advertising strategy to get the most out of advertising.

Stage 1. Study of the current situation. Did you expect Goal Setting to be the first? In vain. After all, your business probably already occupies some position in the market - and then goals are set based on it. If you have conducted a SWOT study, then use its results here: reveal in detail the advantages and disadvantages of the company itself and its product, the risks from other market participants, and the growth potential. Calculate in numbers the static and dynamic sales volume, profitability, and return on investment in advertising. It will not be superfluous to study competitors in terms of prices, products, service offers, a clear assessment of the merits of your company and its product, and research your reputation on the Internet. The more information you collect at this stage, the easier it will be for you in the next ones.

Stage 2. Goal setting. Express in specific numbers the indicators that you expect from your business. Usually, a certain volume of sales, applications and customers is set as a general goal. Next, the goal needs to be decomposed (disassembled into components) for each of the main products or customer clusters. The more detailed the decomposition (to the number of clicks to the site from advertising or to profit from different products), the better. But keep in mind that your plans are still a hypothesis, which, most likely, will have to be corrected later. The main task of this stage is to determine the actions necessary to achieve the overall goal.

Stage 3. Channel selection. Taking into account the elements obtained in the process of decomposition, and the specifics of the target audience of your business identified at the first stage, determine the marketing tools. The general scheme for choosing channels is as follows: for continuous converting traffic, a combination of SEO and contextual advertising is often used. Targeting, SMM and SERM are used to get additional sales, work with reputation, and communicate with customers. But this scheme is very conditional, and in any case, it is necessary to take into account the specific goals of the company.

Stage 4. Evaluation and adjustment. At least monthly you need to analyze the results of the marketing strategy. For example, one of the selected channels may not bring the expected number of sales. It is necessary to find the causes of this inefficiency promptly and eliminate them. And if this is not possible, you need to think about reducing the funding of an inefficient instrument and redistributing the allocated funds for other purposes.

You need to understand right away that creating a strategy once and then following it for many years will not work. It is unrealistic to foresee all the factors influencing marketing at once. The general market situation, an incorrectly posed hypothesis for the target audience, or some other reason will force you to adjust the strategy.