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Test and Learn: The Drivers of Great Senior Living Email Campaigns

Like a runner visualizing the finish line at the beginning of a race, it’s natural to be mindful of end goals before executing email marketing campaigns. That said, does your senior living marketing team have a clear line of sight on the indicators of sound email performance, and tactics to test if they aren’t? It sounds like a no-brainer, but if your community hasn’t, it’s the equivalent to running a race without stretching.

Today, we’re assisting the success of your email marketing campaigns in 2019 by going back to the start. Your team will learn:

• The definitions for six commonly-used email marketing automaton KPIs and elements to continually test

Email Marketing Campaign KPIs: Track, Review and Proactively Test for Success

Key performance indicators, or KPIs for short, are metrics communities can use to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of a strategy in real-time, and whether that end goal will realistically be reached. Commonly-tracked KPIs for email marketing automation include:

1. Open Rates – The number of people who opened the emails your community sends. Your senior living marketing team can enable notifications to be sent when someone opens an email.
2. Click-Through Rates – Expressed as the number or percentage of email recipients who click on at least one link within an email that your community sends.
3. New Email Subscribers – The number of people who choose to subscribe to your community’s emails. In Google Analytics your team can track new subscribers in Conversion reports under ‘goals’.
4. Churn – Percentage of prospects who unsubscribe from your email marketing campaign over a given period of time.
5. Conversion Rate – Percentage of email recipients who complete a desired goal or action that is likely tracked in Google Analytics. This could take the form of email recipients or subscribers taking a survey, downloading a gated piece of content, etc. Any completed goal or action being tracked that’s successfully completed is categorized as a conversion.
6. Bounce Rate – The percentage of emails that fail to be delivered to your recipient and instead is returned to your community due to an inaccurate or invalid email address. There are two types of bounce rates: soft bounces and hard bounces.

Of course, the senior living marketing teams reaching their end goals aren’t passively tracking and reviewing KPIs. They may begin assessing email effectiveness with the definitions above but are also creating customized KPIs specific to their community’s goals. For example, your senior living marketing team might be tasked with improving the occupancy levels for assisted living. The KPIs that are tracked and reviewed will correlate with that specific goal.

Beyond customized KPIs, the senior living marketing teams seeing success with email aren’t waiting until a campaign’s concluded to report results. Instead, they’re proactively testing new ways to engage with email recipients during a campaign. Your community could perform A/B tests to determine the optimal email format. Or, your community could isolate a sample group of subscribers before applying a change across your entire email list.

Based on the KPIs your community identified, senior living marketing teams should proactively test:

• Email copy (content within the body of emails)
• Subject lines (if open rates are lower than expected, try varying and testing the subject line)
• Email format (is it easy and intuitive for prospective residents and ACIs to read?)
• Calls-to-action (CTAs) within emails
• Content offerings shared within the email (relevant links that send recipient to a landing page to convert)
• Font size (factor in your email recipients user-experience and make sure your content is legible)
• Font colors (are some font colors difficult for email recipients to read?)

Frequent testing will help your community determine which combination resonates most with prospective residents and ACIs.

To Help? Or Send Spam. That is the Email Marketing Automation Question. Does Your Community have an Answer?

While the goals of an email marketing campaign will vary from community to community, the components separating successful campaigns from those lacking results should be apparent after reading this post. If they aren’t, contact our team, and we’ll provide expert feedback to help your community create emails that help you reach your goals. Also, if this content is helpful, heed this shameless plug and subscribe to our emails.