Email marketing strategy is one of the strongest strategies in your marketing mix. If you aren’t leveraging email…check out our last post on reasons why you need smart email marketing for your business.
Your email list is one of your business’s most valuable marketing assets. Through smart email tactics, your email marketing strategy can be an ongoing source of revenue-generation.
Creating effective email campaigns for your business should not be considered a “one and done” task.
Ongoing optimizations of your campaigns require time, attention, and testing. Think about the time and thought you put into that last email blast to your list. Are you 100% sure that it performed as well as it could have?
In order to know how well your emails are currently performing, let’s define key terms that will help you better understand your current email performance.
Terms to Know:
- Delivery Rate – Delivery is based on those emails that reach your recipient’s email address and did not bounce (i.e. kicked back by the service provider) or flagged as SPAM.
- Open Rate – Open rates are calculated by dividing the number of emails opened by the total number of emails delivered (not the number on your list). For example, for an email blast that sent to 100 people, but only delivered to 90 emails will be calculated by the 90 emails delivered.
To be considered “opened”, an email must have images enabled and/or a link clicked within the email. - Click-Through-Rate (CTR) – Click-through-rate is the percentage of delivered emails that received at least one click of the links inside your email. CTR can indicate interest in your product, relevance of your offer’s value proposition, and propensity for generating new sales.
Where do you find these metrics? Your email marketing platform should be calculating your open rates for each of your email messages in the reporting section. We recommend checking these stats regularly. H
Now that we better understand the key email metrics, let’s consider the following smart email optimizations that will step up your results.
Step Up Delivery Rates
Delivery rates of your email messages are the first step to improving your results. The more email messages that get delivered, the better chance you have of the message being opened, clicked, and converted. Here are 3 ways to help increase your email list delivery rates.
- Double Opt-in – when someone signs up for your email list, send a confirmation email that requires them to click a link to confirm their subscription. If they are a truly interested prospect, they will take this extra action that indicates to their Email Service Provider (ESP) that they want to hear from you. Plus this will help with your open rates.
- Ask – you never know if you don’t ask. Even with a double opt-in, another way to step up your email delivery rates is to ask them to add your email address to their contact list or “safe recipients” list. This makes your email address a recognized contact and improves the chances of your email landing in their inbox.
- Clean it up – sending emails to a list that is engaged with your messages is one measure ESPs use for determining delivery. If a contact has not opened your email after multiple messages, they may start sending those messages to a Junk or SPAM folder. To reduce this, set-up rules within your email workflows to move contacts to less frequent messaging if they haven’t opened an email after 3 messages.
Delivery rate is a good indicator of the health of your email list. If you are buying or scraping email list, keep an eye on this metric. Too high of a delivery rate can cause larger issues with your email marketing service providers and other lists in your account.
Step Up Open Rates
Once your messages are being delivered, the next step is increasing open rates. Having your emails opened is key in finding success with your email campaigns. In 2018, average email open rate across all industries was 24.8% according to a report by Smart Insights.
- Send from a person, not a business – The first hurdle to email success relies on who the message is coming from. Setting up your emails to come from a person helps to increase open rates. 64% of users indicate that the main reason they open an email is based on who sent the email.
- Test your subject lines – Beyond who the email comes from, the subject line tells the recipient WHY they should open your email. Subject lines should be relevant to the content of your message inside. But…how you go about creating interest and intrigue can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Running A/B testing of your email subject lines is a great way to measure which messaging strategy works best for your audience.
Step Up Click Through Rates
The last email marketing metric that matters for performance is your email’s click-through-rate (CTR). This is the entire goal of your email message…get someone to click the link and take the action on the landing page!
Ultimately, everything inside your email should speak to the recipients want, need, and desire to have what you are offering. Investing time and resources into email copy that converts will step up your results. Setting up A/B testing of different messages or offers will help you use data to optimize your approach to increase your results.
CTR can be tested in a variety of ways. Here is a list of A/B testing ideas that can improve your CTR.
- The format of your email (HTML image-heavy design vs. text-only message)
- The words you use to position your offer
- The clarity of your message
- The perceived value of your offer
The more people who open your email and click the offer link, the more people who get to your landing page where the real conversion happens.
Don’t neglect your email lists. Provide continuous value. Find new ways to step up your results.
Email marketing will continue to be an effective marketing strategy for businesses willing to invest in smart strategies and the right team. Your email strategy is full of never-ending ways to test and iterate for improved results, more revenue, and endless opportunities.
Need help with your email marketing? Let’s chat. We can help you optimize your current email strategy or we can help you get started with smart email strategies to generate ROI. Schedule a call today!
