If you want to master email marketing and have the best results, it is important to keep in mind best practices to optimize the process and results. It is also important to understand and measure marketing results through different metrics.
Define what are the end goals of your marketing campaign, and with those goals in mind, decide in which way you will measure your success. Also, to prevent losing your customers, learn about the most common email marketing mistakes and how to avoid them.
Although each campaign is different, some basic metrics are universal to every campaign.
Contents of Post
Email Marketing Metrics
1. Open Rate
This metric keeps track of the percentage of opened emails which shows how subscribers are engaged. This is one of the simplest metrics but tells a lot, but it is good to use combined with other metrics.
2. Click-through Rate
CTR is a metric that measures how many subscribers clicked on the links in your email. Adding links in logical and appropriate places or adding eye-catching call-to-action buttons can help increase click-through rates.
Do not be surprised if your CTR is low since the average CTR is just over 2%.
3. Bounce Rate
The bounce rate shows how many email addresses did not receive the email. Soft bounces register temporary email address problems, and hard bounces register permanent problems with email addresses.
Comparing bounce rate with open rate shows the quality of your subscriber list.
4. Unsubscribed Rate
This one is very simple. It shows how many people unsubscribed after receiving an email from you.
Although it may look bad at first, seeing this metric can help refine your subscriber list. Remember to include the option to unsubscribe in your emails since this can improve trust in the long run.
5. Return on Investment
One of the most important metrics is the return on investment for the email campaign. Email marketing is known to generally have the highest ROI, even more than other social media channels, by up to 40%.
In some cases, it can bring up to $42 for every $1 spent.
6. Spam Complaints
It is important to pay attention to the number of spam complaints. This can cause email providers to block your email address in case of a large number of complaints. Avoiding spam complaints maximizes the opens, clicks, and conversions on your email campaigns.
All collected metrics should provide valuable data on email campaigns, provide insight into user activity, and help keep the focus on campaign goals. Analyzing the collected metrics will help measure your campaign success and make any necessary adjustments to your campaign.
Best Practices in Email Marketing
Aside from these metrics that help put a number to your campaigns, other best practices greatly help improve subscriber retention and metrics measurement results.
There are countless practices, from welcome emails to custom pop-up forms, and we will take a look at some of the most common and most useful practices for retaining subscribers.
1. Send Welcome Emails
Welcome emails are very effective for multiple reasons. Open rates are above 80%. They keep your subscriber list updated with working emails since invalid email addresses will return a hard bounce, and they provide email recipients with the confirmation that their signup worked.
It is a good practice to offer something valuable in this email that will help connect with new subscribers.
2. Pick the Right Email Frequency
Picking the right number of emails to send and their timing can be tricky. According to data online, the highest open and click-through rates are achieved by sending one newsletter email a week.
Almost 50% of accounts use this approach. Others send 2, 3, or more emails per week, and it all comes down to the question of maximizing your ROI. Instead of looking just at click-through rates, we can look at the total number of conversions our emails generate. Essentially, you should fine-tune this number according to your needs and results.
3. Use Confirmed Opt-in
As with everything, we can agree that quality beats quantity. So, using confirmed opt-in will ensure your mailing lists are clean, further improving open and click-through rates.
It does not take long to determine deliverability improvement with confirmed opt-in. This is achieved by requiring subscribers to follow a confirmation link sent to their emails.
4. Design Emails for Accessibility
Catering to a diverse audience can increase your subscriber base. Since more than 2 billion people have some kind of visual impairment, it is important to improve accessibility for them and other kinds of disabilities.
This can be done, for example, by adding alt text to the images, which will help people that use screen readers, or by improving the design of your emails.
5. Make Your Emails Skimmable
If your emails are too long or complicated, they will not hold attention, and your campaign results will be very poor. Your message has to be communicated as quickly as possible to increase the conversion rate.
By using bullet points, headlines, and lists, you can state your message and make your emails skimmable. This is supposed to increase engagement if done correctly.
6. Test Emails Before Sending Them
Having spelling mistakes, broken links, subject lines, images, etc., can drastically decrease campaign results. To avoid this scenario, test your emails before sending them, perform spell checks, test links and images, and preview emails in popular email clients.
Double-checking your emails before sending them will pay off significantly.
7. Inspire Action
For a campaign to be successful, recipients must take action. Make sure they know what to do next by explicitly asking or making a call to action. This can be achieved by buttons, highlighted text, etc., and keep in mind, not to overuse calls to action since that can be confusing too.
Conclusion
There you have it, some of the best practices to keep in mind when performing email marketing campaigns. There is no specific formula for success. You will have to try out different approaches and find one that suits your needs the best.
The key to a good campaign is fine-tuning according to previous results and results obtained by testing out strategies.