Here's how a SWOT analysis works in email marketing campaigns, rapidly finding the strengths, weaknesses, and areas of improvement.
Marketing campaigns have routinely been one of the most successful marketing strategies that businesses have turned to over the best few decades. However, just because a business runs an email campaign, doesn’t ensure its success. In fact, most businesses fail to optimize their campaigns, leaving gaps in their marketing and leading to email churn.
One of the most effective ways of ensuring an email marketing campaign is as effective as possible is to run a SWOT analysis on it. SWOT analysis allows you to understand the areas of a campaign that you could improve, allowing you to continually find and take advantage of growth opportunities.
In this article, we’ll dive into exactly how to run a SWOT analysis of your email marketing campaign. You’ll be able to work through these strategies, rapidly finding the strengths, weaknesses, and areas of improvement for your campaigns. By optimizing as you go, you’ll create more effective campaigns that customers will engage with,
Let’s jump right in.
What is 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. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, with each one of these forming one area that a business should focus on during its analysis.
You can use a SWOT analysis both before and after launching an email marketing campaign. Doing this will ensure that the results of your analysis reveal distinct information. For example, a strength of a pre-sent email marketing campaign could be its design. When you conduct a SWOT analysis of a post-sent email marketing campaign, you could use some of the interaction metrics as its strengths.
In our age of data-driven marketing, the sheer quantity of information we can gather has made SWOT analysis more effective than ever before. With the results of your analysis, you can then decide to refine your campaign, creating more convincing materials going forward.
Most of the time, when running a SWOT analysis, you want to ensure that the person leading the analysis isn’t the same person who created the email marketing campaign. This process should be as bias-free as possible. If you ask someone to find weaknesses in their own work, they could shy away from full honesty, resulting in a less effective analysis for everyone.
How To Determine Strengths
Strengths are the easiest part of SWOT analysis, as all you’ll need to do is emphasize the areas that your email campaigns excel in. As you can create a high degree of user analytics, you’ll be able to monitor the real strengths of an email campaign with relative ease. For example, you can see the click-through rate, read time, and conversion rate.
At a general level, there are many strengths of email campaigns that you can focus on. As an electronic medium that goes directly to your reader, this is a highly effective way of getting in contact with your audience.
By outlining what your customers are likely to respond well to, you can then focus on delivering more effective email marketing campaigns.
How to Determine Weaknesses
The weaknesses of an email marketing campaign could come in several formats. Perhaps the email automation that you’ve sent doesn’t get the traction that it needs. Alternatively, the design might be lacking, leading to low read times.
In order to determine the possible weaknesses within an email SWOT analysis, you can take two approaches. The first of these is turning to the data. By skimming through the information available to you about your email automation, you can see if you’re surpassing the benchmarks that you’ve set for yourself.
Email is a highly trackable medium, making this something that directly lends itself to SWOT analysis here. If you believe that your emails aren’t getting the traction they need, consider whether your design is off. Does it match your branding, convey a clear message, and relate to what your ideal customer is looking for? If not, you might need to go back to the drawing board.
Luckily, there are a number of online tools that allow you to rapidly create well-designed emails. Using tools like an email signature designer, you can change every element of your campaign emails, from its overall structure to the minute details in your email signature.
Once you’ve listed your weaknesses, you’ll be in a better position to then outline and overcome them.
How to Determine Opportunities
Opportunities are perhaps the most interesting area of the SWOT analysis that marketing teams can take into account. There are well over 340 billion emails sent every single day online, meaning that there is a huge amount of data out there that you can search for. By looking into data about other email marketing campaigns, how they brand, the copy they use, and what they focus on, you can gain insight into potential opportunities for your own campaign.
The opportunities section of your SWOT analysis will allow you to detail new ideas, brainstorm effective strategies to incorporate in the future, and help you inform your own email marketing strategy. While many overlook this area, it is one that can lead to the most effective impacts if done well.
Don’t forget about visualizing all the possible opportunities this high-impact medium can bring to you!
How to Determine Threats
Threats in SWOT analysis are any factors that could slow down your progress, derail your strategy, or create a roadblock for you in the future. Luckily, email is an incredibly stable medium, meaning that there aren’t nearly as many threats when compared to other marketing strategies. For example, a threat to PPC advertising is going way over budget, which could then create knock-on effects on your marketing teams’ future budget.
The threat area you should monitor in email marketing campaigns is the regulations set out by your country and email provider. For example, make sure that you have understood the private data regulations that you’re going to come into contact with. Equally, you should spend time learning about the maximum amount of emails you can send out per day.
Once you outline all potential threats, you’ll be able to set in motion actions that overcome them.
Final Thoughts
Running a SWOT analysis on your email marketing campaigns is an effective way of increasing the quality of the marketing materials that you produce. The brilliance of SWOT is that it covers every internal angle of what a campaign is doing well, what’s going wrong, and areas you should be mindful of.
If you regularly incorporate SWOT analysis into your marketing workflow, you’ll be able to refine your output and engage your audience to a higher degree. Much like A/B testing, this strategy allows marketing teams to clearly see where they can improve. Streamline your workflow and create better email marketing content with consistent SWOT analysis.
