Understanding your business’ operations is the first step toward improving it for increased profitability. When deployed well, an email marketing strategy can be vital to your business’ success. However, using this marketing strategy doesn’t guarantee that your business will progress unless you optimize it for effectiveness. Here’s where a SWOT analysis comes in.
What is a SWOT Analysis?
A SWOT analysis is a framework that can help you develop a plan that will determine your priorities, maximize your growth opportunities, and minimize any potential threats you may encounter. This framework also puts your business in perspective and identifies areas that need to be addressed to be as successful as possible.
It helps you identify the majority of the internal and external components that affect your ability to achieve your goals and create value for your customers. Additionally, knowing your business’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats can help reduce the learning curve to an extent and help you focus on your marketing strategy. Furthermore, you can leverage your findings from a SWOT analysis, a guide to email marketing costs, to craft unique campaigns effectively.
What is a SWOT Analysis in Email Marketing?
SWOT in email marketing is an internal evaluation of whether a campaign deserves financing because of four focal regions (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats). Each of these regions forms one area that a business should zero in on during the analysis process. Additionally, the best part about a SWOT analysis is that you can use it both before and after launching an email marketing campaign.
Going through this process ensures that the results of your analysis reveal distinct and unique information. For instance, a great strength of a pre-sent email in a marketing campaign could be how well it was designed. When subjecting it to a SWOT analysis, you could use some user interaction metrics and their strengths.
After getting your analysis results, you can concentrate your campaign on creating better and more compelling materials going forward. With lucrative (great as a side hustle) data-driven email marketing, and the quantity of information we can gather has made a SWOT analysis very effective.
How to Complete an Email Marketing SWOT Analysis
1) How to Determine Strengths in an Email Marketing Strategy
Strengths are the easiest part to figure out in a SWOT analysis. In this part, you will have to single out the areas that your email campaigns do well in. Since you will have enough user analytics data, you will be able to monitor the real strengths of your email campaigns very easily. For example, you can see the click-through rate, read time, and conversion rate.
Generally, you can always opt to center on the different strengths of your email campaigns. Since they are an electronic medium that makes its way directly to the user is a very effective way of getting in contact with members of your audience. By identifying some of the things that your customers are likely to acknowledge and respond well to, you can also focus on delivering more effective email marketing campaigns.
Some strengths of this strategy include:
- Emails can be tracked easily
- Email provides a way to personalize content for your audience.
- Emails can deliver messages in a timely fashion.
- Emails that bounce can easily be rectified, and it doesn’t cost anything to resend them.
- With emails, you won’t incur more production costs.
- Emails provide quick lead generation.
- Emails can become an integral part of the relationships you have with customers and prospects.
2) How to Determine Weaknesses
The weaknesses of an email marketing strategy exist in several formats. It could be a flaw in the design that leads to slow read times. Additionally, the email automation feature you enabled doesn’t get the traction that it requires. Of course, there are ways to determine the weaknesses within an email marketing campaign.
First, you can always turn to the data and skim through the information that’s available to you about your email automation system. With this, you can see if you’re outperforming the expectations you have set for your campaign. Additionally, since automation is a highly trackable feature, it easily lends itself to the SWOT analysis without a problem.
Secondly, if you believe that your emails are not generating enough audience interest, consider the design. Does it match your branding, convey a clear message, and relate to what your ideal customer is looking for? If it doesn’t, you might reconsider the design. Here are some other possible weaknesses in an email campaign.
- Most consumers are saturated with email. The volume of unsolicited commercial emails (UCE) and permission-based emails is growing daily.
- Mind-numbing details and processes are often required to get a campaign out the door; it’s not an easy process.
- It’s difficult to measure the total audience delivery against your target audience.
3) How to Determine Opportunities
Determining opportunities is perhaps one of the more interesting parts that a marketing team can take into account. Every day about 340 billion emails are sent. This represents a large batch of data that you can use to your advantage. Looking into data about how other email marketing campaigns, their main focus, how they use branding, and how they are sent, you can gain helpful information that can help with potential opportunities you can use in your campaign.
While some people might overlook this area of the SWOT analysis, it can lead to very effective impacts, especially when done well. Additionally, the opportunities you come across will enable you to record new ideas, brainstorm practical strategies to embrace in the future, and inform your email marketing campaign. Lastly, you should visualize all the possible opportunities. Here are some opportunities you could be on the lookout for:
- Email marketing offers a remarkable list growth capability through referral or viral marketing.
- Keeping your audience engaged with the right content provides the chance to create more traffic and potentially increase your sales.
4) How to Determine Threats
When it comes to SWOT analysis in email marketing, threats are factors that could thwart your strategies, slow down any headway you might have made, or create a problem in the future. Fortunately, email marketing is a very stable medium, so there aren’t very many threats to it, especially if you compare it to other marketing strategies. For example, a threat to Pay-Per-Click advertising is going above the set budget, which could then create negative effects on your marketing teams’ future budget.
While there aren’t many threats to email marketing campaigns, there are areas you should monitor, such as the regulations set by your email provider and country of operation. For example, make sure that you have understood the private data directives that you might come into contact with. Therefore, you should spend time researching the maximum amount of emails you can send out per day. Keep in mind that once you outline all the potential threats to your campaign, you will be able to come up with actions to overcome them. Here are some examples of threats:
- Legitimate marketers could face fines and penalties for spamming.
- Lack of expertise in consideration to the people running email campaigns could threaten a brand’s image.
- Technical issues usually increase since campaigns become more sophisticated.
- The effectiveness of an email campaign is diluted due to the bulk of emails in inboxes.
- ISPs could block emails considered spam (most email marketing emails are considered spam).
Advantages of a SWOT Analysis on Email Marketing Campaign
a) Generate Traffic
Applying a SWOT analysis to your campaign will help you to generate more traffic by producing content relevant to your audience. Email marketing campaigns are a great way to get insight and keep your audience and prospective clients occupied and interested with your business and site, by providing value via the right content. This way you get to generate more traffic and consequently more sales.
When creating an email campaign to generate traffic, it is critical to include links with calls to action. This will warrant users to comfortably visit your website and learn more about your services and business. Additionally, this could subsequently expand your client market.
b) Reaching Your Customers at The Right Time
Timing is everything to get the most out of your email marketing campaign and SWOT analysis audit. Email marketing campaigns sent and received promptly don’t take long to plan compared to a traditional marketing campaign. Additionally, you can come up with an email marketing campaign on short notice and still have it reach your customers in a timely fashion.
Since timing is key, you should ensure that you send your emails at the right time to effectively increase engagement with your customers. Since there’s no specific time in which your customers are guaranteed to read your email. Therefore, you might have to use various tests to ensure you find the ideal time to send your emails.
This way, you can increase the engagement you have with loyal customers who will be anticipating your new content. This can also improve your open and clickthrough rates if you’re always on your customer’s minds.
c) Personalizing Emails
Personalizing emails can help your business to increase its click-through rate. When you write a personal message to your potential customers and active customers, they are less likely to view it as spam and are more likely to open it. You can start by addressing your customers by their names when communicating the subject line of the email. You can also use the following:
- Sending product recommendations and discounts based on previous purchases.
- Sending emails on special days such as birthdays and national holidays with personalized messages.
- Creating relevant content based on categories that interest your audience.
You might need to analyze multiple personalization techniques to find one that fits your business. Note that personalization doesn’t involve using your customer’s name only, but it’s a great place to start. Personalization should include:
- Power: Use a conversational tone, and write like you’re talking to one person rather than an audience of multiple email recipients.
- Customization: Being personal should extend beyond the formal language used in your email messages. You can start to use contractions, slang, and sentence fragments if that’s the language and style your target audience is comfortable with.
- Description: Your email marketing messages should include short but concise descriptions of the features of your offer.
- Trust: The content of your message should be perceived as authentic. People are more likely to trust your brand, which will boost your conversions.
- Persuasion: You should be able to craft persuasive content that doesn’t seem like you’re overselling your services or products.
Frequently Asked Questions About Email Marketing SWOT Analysis
i) What is a SWOT analysis in email marketing?
A SWOT analysis in email marketing is an internal assessment of whether a campaign is worth funding based on four central areas and is a method for finding, analyzing, and recording your company’s internal strengths and weaknesses that are within the scope of your control and external opportunities and threats that can undoubtedly affect the actualization of your marketing objective.
ii) How do you write a marketing SWOT analysis?
Begin by doubling down on your strengths, then turning your weaknesses into strengths, creating a plan to act on any opportunities that may arise, and finally, setting up measures for mitigating threats.
iii) What are the 4 elements of a marketing email?
Every email marketing message should deliver on the promise of your subject line by including relevant details. To do that successfully, your messages should contain five key elements: power, personalization, description, trust, and persuasion.
The Bottom Line
It doesn’t matter what stage your business is in. Conducting an aggressive SWOT analysis campaign can help your company gain a marketing edge over your competitors. Additionally, creating a marketing strategy necessitates that you acknowledge what your brand is already good and successful at and what needs to be upgraded. With this mentality, you should also have consideration for industry trends and set growth targets.