7 Steps to Optimize Your Email Marketing Team's Performance

Even in today’s time, where marketing channels are born and discarded without so much as a second thought, emails have held onto the position of the primary professional communication channel for decades. More importantly, it is still one of the highest ROI-generating channels of communication. According to Direct Marketing Association, emails generate an average ROI of $42 for every dollar spent — one of the highest among all communication channels.

No wonder, companies are increasingly investing in strong email marketing teams that can be more flexible, adaptable, and seamlessly generate returns through well-executed campaigns. However, like every other department in a growing organization, email marketing often requires the combined skillset of multiple people, and to drive their performance can get quite challenging.

With that in mind, here are a few tips that can not only help you manage but also optimize the performance of your email marketing team effectively:

#1 Align KPIs with the Goals

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are a great way to measure your team’s performance — regardless of the department. In email marketing teams, they can also be beneficial in constantly tracking whether your processes align with the goals that you have set for your campaigns. The KPIs should be created with the aim of accelerating the process of achieving the organizational goals.

For instance, if one of the goals of your email marketing campaign is to increase brand awareness and reach, then some of the KPIs you can assign to your team members can include the number of new subscribers gained by their efforts, and the number of conversions the emails are able to drive.

If you are wondering how KPIs can help you improve and optimize the performance of your email marketing team, few useful ways are by:

• Creating KPIs according to the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic and Time-Bound) criteria
• Designing Key Result Areas (KRAs) for each team member carefully, and setting KPIs according to those KRAs, and organizational goals
• Using benchmarking data to ensure that your team can achieve the ideal performance on the key email marketing metrics. Benchmarking allows you to weigh and compare your processes and business activities to the best practices followed in the industry

#2 Integrate Training Seamlessly

When we talk about training any marketing team, one factor that should always be at the core of it all is flexibility. Adapting to changing trends, and constantly testing the effectiveness of your emails are some crucial aspects of building highly effective email marketing campaigns. Your training programs should be constantly updated to reflect this and have mechanisms that are equally effective in training your remote team members.

Moreover, you can also implement seamless training using simple but effective ways such as:

• Designing training modules in an easily accessible format such as videos, or presentations so that all team members can learn independently, irrespective of their location
• Implementing a digital adoption platform to ensure that your employees can use all the features and options of the existing email automation software for achieving the desired results. Digital Adoption Platforms can be useful in training employees with the help of detailed and interactive walkthroughs.
• Create an on-the-job training program for your team that can help them learn useful strategies, recent trends, and tools on the go

#3 Measure Key Metrics for Assessing Performance

One of the primary things that you can do to monitor and improve the performance of your team is to rely on objective parameters as much as subjective ones. In this regard, measuring some of the key objective metrics such as open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, and spam complaints to see which aspects of your email marketing campaigns require improvements, will prove beneficial.

In order to optimize the performance of your email marketing team as per the key metrics of email marketing campaigns, you should:

• Empower employees to track the email marketing metrics by granting them access to analytics and encourage them to include the results in their reports
• Have incentives associated with key metrics to encourage team members to perform better in those specific areas

#4 Recruit Top Talent Using a Vigorous Hiring Process

They say the best way to ensure that you have the right talent in your team is to make your hiring process more robust. One of the most effective ways to boost the performance of your email marketing team is to hire personnel who have a proven track record in it. As a recruiter for your team, you need to evaluate the skill set of potential candidates and align their experience with the value they can add to your team. To make your hiring process easier and faster, consider using recruitment software that helps you source, hire, and manage candidates in a single dashboard.

To recruit the top talent for your email marketing team, you should:

• Be active in the email marketing community and make a list of email marketers that you admire, and want within your team
• Have a task-based hiring process, wherein the email marketing skills of the candidate can be assessed
• Provide employee benefits and incentives that top talent in the field are looking for so that they are motivated to join your team

#5 Balance between Short-term and Long-term Campaigns

When you have an email marketing team that handles a lot of communication for clients as well as your business, they would undoubtedly have a lot on their plate. A primary challenge that such teams face is striking the right balance between short-term and long-term campaigns so that team members are not overwhelmed. Sometimes, your teams are working remotely, so It's also important to have skills for managing virtual teams, keeping them engaged, and focused.

In fact, optimizing the workflow of your team might often be the right solution for driving their performance effectively, which requires you to better prioritize tasks. Some ways in which you can balance the short-term and long-term campaigns for optimizing your team’s performance are:

• Use a workspace software to manage the schedules and priorities of your team members so that they know what to focus on
• Assign bouts of respite to employees who have been working on long campaigns so that they can get back to work with renewed energies. Use field tracking software for this purpose.
• Manage the priorities of your team members in a way that they can balance the tasks associated with short-term campaigns along with the long-term ones effortlessly

#6 Have a Mixed-Bag of Resources

When you are building a strong email marketing team, having just a content marketing specialist paired with a writer can seldom do the trick. If you have a large database and a bigger flow of emails to deal with every day, you may need more resources and expertise on your team. To accomplish this, you must be clear with the goals that you want your email marketing team to achieve, and then pin down the type of resources that are required.

For instance, larger companies that want to channel their email communication to different kinds of parties might need a content strategist, and in some cases a designer to add more graphic elements to emails. Here are a few ways to create a winning email marketing team mix:

• Defining a team leader and working your way down to include other resources that might be required for better email marketing campaigns
• Considering any future improvements or additions that you want to make in your email marketing strategy, and hiring to facilitate those changes
• Having a technical team that can work on the backend to monitor vital metrics, the impact on your website traffic, or to use their HTML/CSS skills to upgrade the quality of your emails

#7 Consider Automation for Time-Consuming Processes

Automation can be a great way to optimize your email marketing efforts and the capabilities of your team. When email marketing campaigns get bigger, they might require many processes which may get time-consuming. While manual touch is always required to ensure quality and uniqueness in email marketing campaigns, automating repetitive tasks can help optimize the efficiency of your team.

By saving time from repetitive tasks, you can help your team invest their time on something more important and rewarding. This way, in days of tight deadlines, they can easily manage things without affecting their work-life routine and sleep cycles. 

For instance, teaching your team members how to make the most of a new enterprise email marketing software can get pretty mundane. Instead, using a digital adoption platform such as Apty or any of the other top Apty alternatives such as Whatfix can replace human effort that can be channeled into more fruitful activities. Such a platform adds as an overlay to your email marketing software and guides your team to use the software’s features to their fullest.

Here are a few ways to use automation for optimizing the performance of your email marketing team:

• Tasks like lead generation or nurturing require extensive email exchanges which can be automated based on certain triggers (such as a welcome email, customer feedback survey email, etc.), thus letting you focus your energy on the creative aspects of email marketing
• Automation software allows you to assign deadlines to tasks that you are delegating to your team, thus helping you manage their efficiency and workload
• Segmentation and maintenance of email lists can be a cumbersome task if you have a large database, which can be easily simplified using email automation software

Summing up

Running a successful email marketing campaign is a big undertaking, especially for companies that rely on it for lead generation and conversions. Since emails can be instrumental in achieving your organizational goals and targets, having a highly productive team is of utmost importance.

To accomplish this, constantly optimizing the performance and efficiency of your team should be an integral part of your existing processes. Using automation software and email marketing assessment, adding expert personnel, training them effectively, and monitoring the key performance metrics are some of the steps you can take to optimize your email marketing team’s performance.