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Use data to improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns
Email marketing is the easiest and cheapest form of marketing that you can do. A good email marketing strategy consists of specific emails to send and constantly improving the metrics to reach the right audience. I covered the types of emails you can send in a previous blog post.
Adapting your email marketing strategy
Many marketers think that email marketing is dead in the era of marketing through short social media posts. But, with everyone going digital, emails are accessed more often now. Younger people are more likely to have an email account now to receive communication from their schools and colleges.
What is dead is the way of email marketing. Gone are the days of having a large list with little or no engagement. The focus of email marketing these days is to get as many opens as possible, irrespective of the size of the list. In this blog post, I will talk about the metrics you should be tracking and how to improve them.
Open rate
Open rate is the number of people who open your emails, relative to the number of sends. If you send your email to 10 people and 2 open the email, then your open rate is 20%. There are industry benchmarks for open rates, which are around 15% to 30% depending on the industry.
Click rate
Click rate is the number of people who clicked the link in your email. Different email marketing providers calculate it differently, so do check their formula. Normally, click rate is the number of clicks divided by the number of sends. The average click rate across all industries is 2.5%.
These open and click rates are alright for newsletters or blogs, but you should aim higher when you want them to take an action. Emails that inform the user about discounts or special offers should be seen and clicked by as many people as possible. But, how do you do that? This is where segmenting comes in.
Segmenting your email list
This is technically not a metric that you can track, rather a strategy to improve your metrics. Segmenting means dividing your email addresses by certain categories.
The most common segmentation is by engagement. Create a separate list of people who open your email most often, e.g. more than 40% emails opened out of the ones sent so far. These people are willing to read your emails and have developed a relationship with you. So, these are the best people to ask to take an action. Direct your action emails to them only.
Another segmentation could be by the source of lead. You may have collected leads during an offline event. Now you can send them an email to direct them to your online shop. This way you will engage with them further and nudge them towards a purchase.
Other ways to segment are by location and gender. However, these will be useful only when you have something specific for a place or gender.
Cleaning your email marketing list
As your email list grows bigger, your open and click rates will drop. This is either because people have lost interest in your emails or new people joined in who never wanted the emails in the first place. There are a couple of ways you can improve the health of your list.
Every couple of months send out a re-engagement email to your inactive subscribers e.g. pick those people who have not opened the last 4 emails. Send them a reminder email about how they signed up and what value your emails offer. Point them to the unsubscribe link as well in the email, so that they can do that if they want to.
Pro-actively unsubscribe people from your list that have not become active despite reminders. You can also remove people from your list if they have been inactive for a long time.
Email marketing is still a great tool to stay on top of your customer’s minds. But, it is important to adapt your email marketing strategy based on what is working these days.
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