New Year, New Strategy? 5 Tips for Successful Marketing in 2022

With the change in the calendar, it’s an excellent opportunity to reflect on the past year’s wins and losses. How was your year as a marketer? Did you reach your goals? If not, why not? If so, how can you improve on your successes?

We have some ideas, naturally. Here are five areas you can focus on to create a successful marketing plan for 2022.

Create a Performance Baseline for 2021

First up, determine how successful your marketing strategy was in 2021. You may have a ballpark idea of how well your campaigns performed, but now’s a great time to get it in writing.

After all, if you don’t create a performance baseline for 2021, how will you know when you beat those numbers in 2022?

There are a few ways you can create a baseline for your performance. The most common method is to create a historical baseline, also known as a pre/post comparison.

To accomplish this, you can run a report within your marketing automation software to determine your past average unique open and click-thru rates, and any other metrics you find valuable.

Of course, this type of baseline will include variables such as time of year or type of content that may have impacted performance, but it’s an excellent place to start. And since the goal is to find areas for improvement, this type of overview can help.

There are a few other ways of determining a baseline, depending on your goals. We have another article that covers this topic more in-depth.

Update Your Campaign Logic

Our next suggestion for improving your 2022 marketing strategy is to examine your campaign logic. By this we mean that with recent changes in the industry, data on open rates has gotten much more polluted, and maybe it’s time to focus on optimizing content for click-thru.

Since we filter out the pollution, Motiva customers can still rely on the open rates we collect and report. But that filtering still results in less data overall. So for a better assessment of your audience’s engagement rates, begin to focus on giving your audience a reason to click-thru.

Check out this article on Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection with our recommendations for a complete picture.

Are You on the Right Frequency?

Our third recommendation for creating a successful email marketing strategy for 2022 is to look at your email frequency settings and construct tests to ensure it’s optimized for each of your target segments.

With Motiva, it’s easy to see where the frequency sweet spots are for your audience. And while that’s great for monitoring overall engagement, it may be worthwhile to try to identify your “super fans” — those contacts who would appreciate receiving even more content from you.

For a more detailed description of how to create a frequency test for a particular segment, check out this article.

Optimize Content for Key Audiences

Our fourth suggestion for improving your marketing success in 2022 is to optimize your content for key audiences.

The best way to do this is to use Motiva’s Multivariate Message Testing capabilities. Instead of just trying out two emails in a standard A/B test, try creating multiple, wildly different variations.

There will probably be a few that don’t resonate with your audience, and that’s okay. Once those weaker emails are identified, the Message Testing step will automatically stop sending those emails.

This ensures that the highest percentage of your audience receives your best messaging, with no user intervention required. And you can learn from the failures.

Update Audience Segmentation

Our fifth recommendation for creating a more successful marketing strategy in 2022 is to update your audience segmentation.

Just like there may be segments of super fans that want more content from you, there may also be segments that have been overlooked by traditional marketing messages.

You already know which emails performed best overall during a Motiva Message Testing step. But have you looked at the emails that didn’t perform as well? It may seem a bit counter-intuitive, but those weaker emails may uncover some of these overlooked audience segments.

When you look at the Who’s Responding tab, instead of focusing just on the winning email, check the contact attributes in the emails that didn’t receive the same level of engagement. It could be that while they were less popular overall, they may have resonated with a different segment of your audience.

If you do find a segment that engages with different messaging, you may want to consider creating a Buyer’s Persona specifically for that group and create similar content just for them.

For a more thorough look at identifying new segments, check out this article.

By implementing or updating these strategies, you'll be setting yourself up for email marketing success in 2022.

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