How do you know how your email marketing performs? How are your emails being received by your recipients, and what do you need to improve? What metrics should I use? What should be considered?
In this part of the guide series, you’ll get tips and tricks on how to measure the impact of your email marketing and what you can do to optimize them.
Whether you’re just getting started or have been doing email marketing for a few years, follow-up is something you should take seriously. With that said, we would still like to stress that the most important thing when it comes to email marketing is that you send your newsletters.
Your most important metric should be to get regularity in your email marketing. Once you’ve got that routine down, you can start thinking about how to optimize and get even better at writing and designing newsletters.
There are some limitations to the ratio. Nothing is telling the sending mail server that an email has been opened. To measure open rate, you add an invisible image to the email, and when that image is invoked (opened), the mail is reported as opened.
As a result, a certain amount of blindness may appear in the opening rate. For example, if the recipient’s email program automatically blocks images or if the recipient reads the email on a mobile phone and chooses not to download images in the email, for example, to save mobile data.
Write great subject lines – Test which subject lines your recipients seem to like. To find out, it’s wise to A/B test the subject lines. That is, divide the recipients into two groups and use different headings to see which one gets the most open emails.
For example, you could write:
To move the mail from the Campaign tab to Primary, you need to (1) add our sender address to your contacts and (2) move the email from Campaign to Primary so that the email program learns where your emails should go.
Technically, newsletter services like Get a Newsletter can’t tell if it’s a human or a curious application that has clicked through to an email. Curious programs could be, for example, spam filters, anti-virus software, or similar.
Please go in and check the email when it is received to make sure that it does not contain any anomalies with incorrect click records. Nevertheless, click-through rates are a good measure of interest and engagement over time.
Conversion rate is a measure of how many of your readers went on to do what you wanted them to do after reading your email. A “conversion” does not necessarily mean a purchase.
Depending on what you want to achieve with your emails, a “conversion” for you might be the number of people who signed up for a webinar, signed up for a trial of your product, or downloaded a file. In other words, the number who did what you wanted them to do next after reading the email.
You need to monitor conversion rates using external analytics software such as Google Analytics. You won’t see conversion rates directly in Get a Newsletter’s tool.
Luckily, you can easily add your Google Analytics tracking tag to the email, so you can track how many purchases and signups are coming from your email sendings.
The average unsubscribe rate per newsletter is 0.1%. You can expect at least 0.1% to unsubscribe every time you send a newsletter, so don’t be blind trying to get this figure down to 0.
A certain percentage of unsubscriptions is normal. However, if the figure goes above 2%, it’s time to look at what might be causing it.
There is a gap in the number of passively unsubscribed subscribers. These are the subscribers who have not bothered to go in and actively unsubscribe but have stopped opening, reading, and clicking on your emails.
Perhaps your emails have even been relegated to a separate inbox. In this way, the Unsubscribe Rate is not a 100% accurate measure of how many people unsubscribe.
The bounce rate is a measure of the percentage of your emails that cannot get delivered to the recipient’s inbox. It’s a good measure to find out how your email list is performing and whether you’re firing on all cylinders when you do your mailings. That is if you are paying to send to recipients who are not reached by your emails anyway.
Note that a distinction exists between hard and soft bounces. A hard bounce means the email address does not exist. For example, it may be misspelled or deleted by the recipient. A soft bounce is caused by temporary problems such as technical problems on the receiving server, full inboxes, or spam filters.
In Get a Newsletter, a contact is deactivated immediately after a hard bounce, but only after three soft bounces.
You will only see the bounce rate once you have sent an email. There is no way to see in advance which addresses are incorrect.
Therefore, to avoid a high bounce rate, you need to find a way to continuously keep up to date with the email addresses of your potential customers. You don’t want to waste a chance to communicate with a potential customer just because the customer has changed the email address for example.
To solve this, you can include a line at the bottom of the email with information on how they can update their email address when they change.
ROI is a measure of how much you earn per dollar invested in your email marketing. That is, the time you spend and the money you pay to do the emails. Newsletters are known to be the digital marketing channel with the highest ROI.
The average ROI for email campaigns and newsletters is 36%. This means that for every dollar you invest in email marketing and newsletters, you will get back $36.
It can be tricky to calculate the return on investment for your email marketing as a whole. The calculation is based on the total profit you can link to your email marketing divided by the total cost of your email marketing.
The hard part will be drawing the line in terms of costs. To get an idea, you have to make an estimate. From writing your first word on a newsletter to having a new customer, what are the costs for time and mailing?
To improve the return on your newsletter marketing channel, you need to work on all the points above. You need to do everything to increase your open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate.
At the same time, you also need to work on reducing bounce rates and unsubscribe rates. A minor improvement at a time will yield great results in the long run.
So, in summary, there are a set of things you can work on to improve all the KPIs mentioned above.
First and foremost, it’s about how you write your emails, that the content is tailor-made to the recipient, what subject lines you use, and that the emails are designed appealingly. You can experiment with the number and timing of your emails based on the time of day when your target audience is most receptive.
It is also worth reviewing your email lists periodically to reduce bounces. You may also consider removing contacts who have never opened your emails, as they will affect your statistics.
When talking about metrics, it’s important to remember that emails and newsletters are long-term investments. It produces results over time. Of course, it’s great if your emails are liked from the start, that open rates & clicks flourish and that you instantly get a bunch of visitors who convert into customers.
Keep in mind that it may take a lot of testing before you get it right. The most important thing is that you have a plan, submit it continuously, work on milestones and test your way through with minor improvements.
Do you find you’re not getting the impact you want, even though you’ve been experimenting and optimizing for a while? Then don’t be afraid to ask your readers what they want to see more and less of.
We’re your cheering squad! And remember, we’re just an email away. Feel free to ask us if you have any questions or concerns about how to analyze and optimize your emails.
Drop us an email at support@getanewsletter.com, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we possibly can.
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