Let’s try to understand Email marketing and how to optimize it.
Email marketing is one of the best Digital Marketing channels. We need to know how to get started with email marketing, build your email list, write great emails for your email marketing campaigns, and how to use segmentation & email automation.
Whether it’s your AdWords campaign or Facebook ads campaign, there is always some room for Email marketing to optimize the performance and results. It’s the same with email marketing too. But before you dive into optimization techniques. you need to measure the performance to know how your email marketing campaign is performing.
Hence, what to measure? Which metrics are essential to understanding the performance?
There are feast metrics you can track. I am listing them all with a quick note about each one.
Click-through Rate
It is the percentage of people who clicked one or more links in the email they received. whichever comes to hand take the total clicks or unique clicks to calculate the % provided you use the same approach consistently.
As likely as not is the single most important metric to track because it tells you how good your emails are.
Conversion Rate
It is the percentage of people who clicked on a link in an email and completed the action that is measured as a conversion. It could be a purchase or completing a lead form.
Recall, that it’s a tricky goal because the goal of the email is to get the reader to click on the links and conversion is the goal of the landing page.
Further, the email failed to set up the reader to complete the desired action, even the best landing pages cannot convert them.
Furthermore, even the best-written emails cannot guarantee a conversion if you send the reader to a poor landing page.
You have to keep this in mind while measuring the conversion rate
Bounce Rate
It’s the percentage of total emails sent that aren’t delivered to the intended inbox. There are two types of bounce rates:
Hard Bounce
Soft Bounce.
A hard bounce is the result of an invalid or closed email address that can’t be fixed, and a soft bounce is the result of temporary issues like mail server problems or full-inbox.
ISPs use bounce rate as a key factor to determine the email sender’s reputation and having too much a bounce rate could place you on the spammer’s list.
List Growth Rate
Email Marketing to optimize includes the rate at whichever your email list is growing is another email marketing metric that tells you when you hit the saturation level.
Email Deliverability Rate
This tells you the percentage of emails sent that reached the recipient’s inbox. It’s an important metric because it tells you anyhow your emails are passing the SPAM test or not.
Open Rate
The percentage of the people who opened the email they received. The email marketing community has a split verdict on the validity of this metric.
Yet, I’d recommend you track this metric because it gives an idea of how good your subject lines
Disengagement Rate
These are the subscribers who stopped opening, reading, and clicking your emails. You have either considered running an email campaign to reactivate these people or considering removing them from the list.
A low engagement rate can force email clients to send your emails to the junk folder if it’s not fixed soon. It can affect the optimization of Email Marketing too.
Unsubscribes Rate
This tells you how many people are finding your content poor or irrelevant. Watch out, this should always be seen with the disengagement rate because most of the people find your emails irrelevant. Normally don’t go through the unsubscribe process, but usually, stop opening and clicking them.
Optimization
Now, that you know the metrics that matter, let’s move on to the Email marketing s optimization techniques:
Open Rate Optimization
If it’s not opened, it won’t be read or clicked. Thus first you need to optimize your emails to get them opened. Tips to get more open:
- Optimize your subject lines. Test different subject lines and see which words are resonating with your readers.
- Try different senders’ names and see which one works better. Research has shown that emails sent from a personal sender’s id tend to work better.
- Try different times to send the emails.
Click Through Optimization
The goal of the email is to get clicks. If it’s not getting clicked, it’s almost a failed campaign. Tips to get more clicks
- Write a better call to action. They should persuade the reader to click.
- Segment your list. Relevant emails to the right audiences can double the click-through rates.
- Make emails mobile friendly. Almost half of all emails sent are opened on mobiles and optimizing them for mobiles can get you more clicks.
Email Deliverability Optimization
Don’t buy lists. Buying lists means your recipients don’t know you and may mark your emails as SPAM which will hurt your deliverability rate and reputation.
Remove your hard bounces. Check your list regularly for hard bounces and remove them from your list.
Focus on engagement: High engagement will get your emails to the primary inbox instead of junk folders.