One of our most frequently asked questions from new partners and in the community is about Email Marketing. People want to know where they should start.
We tell them:
A marketing email can be only as successful as the list you send it to. Before you even think about creating a campaign, you better know who is receiving the email and what is important to them.
Here’s a list of things to think about when considering email marketing:
· Do you have a clean data list of emails you can send to?
· Do you have a system to send and automate emails?
· Does that system allow you to use custom variable information so each email can be personalized?
If you’ve got these bases covered, then think about the design of your email:
· Can the recipient clearly identify who the email is from?
· Are they able to take direct action from the email?
· Did you provide value to them?
Most importantly: Can you track it? Who opened, clicked, unsubscribed, responded etc?
Email marketing contains a lot of different terms that will explain data in regards to how successfully your message was delivered. Knowing if you did well starts with knowing what all the data points mean.
We’ve compiled a little glossary to get you started-
Delivery Rate
This one mostly explains itself; it is the amount of emails that were delivered into an inbox. This number is good to know because you want to make sure that the emails are getting to where you intended. A high delivery rate means you have a clean email list, and a lower delivery rate means you might want to evaluate your data. Reasons why an email did not get delivered can be found in the bounce rate section below.
The goal for any marketing email would be to have your delivery rate be 100%
Open Rate
The open rate is measuring how many people are opening the email that was sent to them. This is an important number to pay attention to because if no one is opening your email in the first place, there is no hope of them reading what the email contains. The sender and subject of the email are crucial in catching the reader’s attention. If they don’t care about the subject or who it is from they wont open it.
Depending on the industry, Marketing or promotional emails with an open rate of 20% or higher would be considered successful.
Click Rate
This is the percentage of people who clicked on the content in the email that was delivered to them. This differs from the “click through rate” because the click through rate determines the percentage of people who opened your email that clicked through it, rather than the amount of people who were delivered the email.
Depending on the industry, marketing or promotional emails with a click rate of 2% or higher would be considered successful.
Click Through Rate
The click through rate looks at how many people opened your email and have clicked on a link inside. In other words, it is how many people took action when reading your email. This is where calls to action, easy to read layouts and content that provides value comes into play. Think about all the emails you receive in a day. It’s one thing to open, skim and delete an email, but how often are you reading through an email and clicking a link to learn more? What motivates you to click?
Bounce Rate
This is the number of emails that were not delivered successfully into an inbox. You can have two different kinds of “bounces” – hard or soft.
A hard bounce generally means the email address you are trying to send to does not exist.
A soft bounce typically means there is a problem with the recipient’s server. Either their security did not accept your send or they have a connectivity issue, etc.
It is good to know the difference between bounce types in order to determine if you need to reevaluate some of the email addresses that you have, or change up your send tactics.
Here is an example of our last email that was sent out for a blog post. You can see that our subject is the title of the blog post and the email is coming from VSG Marketing.
Overall, this would be considered a pretty successful email send! Nearly all of our intended ends were received. We’ll back track on those 4 bounces and figure out what’s happening with those addresses. Our open rate is above 20%, and our click rate is double the 2% goal.
We’d look at this data and have the following takeaways:
- Our list is clean except for 4 addresses, let’s review.
- We want our open rate to be higher. Our audience may have not been interested in our topic, or the time we sent the email wasn’t ideal for open rates.
- Our click through rate was great! That means of the people who opened it, a good chunk of them read the email and were motivated to take action. We had a CTA and it was easy to understand.
This is just one promotional email snapshot of data, but we can make many beneficial adjustments to our future emails based on this information. Imagine how useful multiple emails worth of data will be!
Need help improving your email marketing campaign? Send us an email here!
