The constant cycle of creating, sending, and optimizing marketing emails is exhausting…especially when the results aren’t matching up with the amount of effort you put in.
While this is universally true, no matter what industry you’re in or what ESP you use, today we’re going to look specifically at some of the ways Pardot marketers can maximize the ROI of their campaigns.
Whether you want to refine your current strategy or make significant improvements, here are a few tips to help you achieve better results with less effort.
Note: When Salesforce acquired Pardot, it rebranded the tool to “Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.”
ROI, or Return on Investment, measures the profitability of your email campaigns. It’s typically written as a percentage and is calculated by dividing the net profit from your emails by the total cost of the campaigns.
By focusing on ROI, you gain a clearer picture of how effective your email marketing is.
You can use the data that goes into calculating your ROI to make more informed decisions about where to allocate your resources, which strategies to continue or scale, and which to refine or abandon.
Depending on your goals and objectives, you’ll want to gain a clear picture of what “success” looks like for your email marketing, and what goes into creating that success. A few key metrics to look at include:
Successful email campaigns start with aligning your email marketing goals with your overall business objectives. This alignment helps maintain focus, so that your email campaigns are always designed to contribute meaningfully to your company’s success.
To set effective goals, many marketers adhered to the SMART framework:
By dividing your email list into smaller, more targeted segments based on specific criteria, you can deliver more relevant and personalized content.
For example, if there are users who have already expressed interest in your product or services (via a form submission or some other interaction), you can create a highly-targeted campaign that builds on the action they’ve already taken.
A few of the segments you might consider using:
Personalized emails are an evergreen tactic to achieve, with one source citing an impressive open rate of 29% and a click-through rate of 41%.
You can fully personalize your email communications by using Pardot’s Handlebars Merge Fields capability. Some ideas to implement include:
According to Litmus, ”The biggest blockers marketers face during email production are building (41%), designing (40%), and testing (39%).”
I’ve worked in email marketing for nearly a decade, and have spent a good chunk of that time agonizing over all three of those blockers. Not only does every work hour count when it comes to calculating ROI, but lengthy email creation processes are difficult if not impossible to scale properly.
So let’s take a look one of the top ways to reduce the time spent on email creation—so that you can apply yourself to your own zone of genius in building and scaling a successful email marketing strategy:
Automating Pardot emails can be a game-changer for your marketing efforts. This efficiency allows you to focus on strategy and creativity, rather than getting bogged down in repetitive tasks. Automation helps ensure that your emails are timely and relevant, which can significantly improve engagement and conversions.
Pardot offers a range of automation features that can streamline your email marketing efforts. Utilizing Pardot email marketing is crucial for creating effective email campaigns:
One powerful tool to enhance your email automation is FeedOtter, one of the industry’s best-kept secrets, which integrates seamlessly with Pardot and allows you to automate the creation and sending of your Pardot newsletters.
If you send out RSS-triggered emails (a blog digest or newsletter roundup), FeedOtter can pull the content from your blog or news feed and compile it into an email that sends automatically through your Pardot account.
If you’re sending more complex newsletters that require a manual touch, you might dig deeper into FeedOtter’s features, which include content curation tools and a drag-and-drop email builder.
The curation tools alone help save hours of time spent copy & pasting content, resizing images—and adding it all to your email can be done with a simple click of a button.
In addition to the time-savings, the fact that FeedOtter’s emails are sent from your Pardot account means that you retain access to all the important email metrics that you need to make data-based decisions on where to put your efforts.
By leveraging Pardot’s automation features and integrating tools like FeedOtter, you can streamline your email marketing processes, increase efficiency, and ensure that your campaigns are both timely and relevant.
Here are a few other takeaways to keep in mind as you continue to work on maximizing the ROI of your Pardot email campaigns.