Posts Tagged ‘email reports’

MarketingSherpa on the most effective email list growth tactics

Thursday, March 31st, 2011

This week’s chart from MarketingSherpa shows the results of a survey given to 1,100 email marketers on the most effective means of acquiring new subscribers.

The survey deals with email growth tactics and their effectiveness, and, although the results are by no means surprising, we can extract very valuable information from this chart.

MarketingSherpa’s survey on the most effective email list growth tactics

What to take from this

Registration during purchase

First of all, we can see that registration during purchase is still very effective, and that is something everyone (but the 6% who may find this tactic ineffective) should incorporate in their campaigns. Clearly, the user is interested in hearing more from you if he or she makes a purchase.

Then again, the chart says that offering registration is very effective to acquire new subscribers. It is guesswork to say whether or not you’ll sell anything to these prospects in the future. So, in the end, to actually sell more, not just grow your list, you have to divide users into segments, and provide information interesting to them, not someone else.

Providing value to the customer

Registration for downloads and other valuable freebies as a trade-off for a subscription is just a “best practice”, yet it is often forgotten how well it (giving value) actually works. Actually, 4 of the 5 most effective means of list building have something to do with giving value, so here’s something to keep under the pillow.

Online vs. offline events

Online events are regarded as more effective than offline events, probably because they offer immediate value. However, offline events are also shown as effective, but that could depend heavily on the niche (if a person can find everything on the topic/products online, why bother visiting a convention, a tradeshow or an exhibition?).

Mobile email is still on the horizon

You could argue that mobile is the dark horse of this survey, but with the ascension of mobile phone usage, even these numbers seem somewhat disappointing.

Although different reports suggest that mobile email will become one of the hottest means of acquiring emails, mobile email viewing is still something that will expand — and that marketers need to work more on.

Other means of acquiring subscribers

Placing an actual sign-up form on your website (email newsletter subscriptions) is still a top-notch practice, obviously.

Co-registration programs and paid search are both well-grounded methods, yet most marketers consider these methods only “somewhat effective”.

It is likely that these methods seldom offer any real value to the customer, except for times when the customer receives cash or free iPods for signing up. That has… eh, nothing to do with your business, right? However, there are marketers who consider co-registration effective, and it is mostly effective if there is no money involved — only good will and sharing with other email marketers who are relevant to your niche.

And it seems that by the time the survey was taken (September 2010) social sharing was still something that didn’t work for everyone. However, social sharing should be somewhat effective either way, because of the very small costs involved.

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Posted in Email List Management, Email Marketing Reports | No Comments »

How email marketing metrics can help you to make your campaigns more efficient

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

Email Marketing MetricsData from email marketing reports is often misjudged and even misused. Instead of using statistics to improve campaigns, marketers often use email marketing metrics to show the highest quarter (i.e. their boss) that email marketing is, in fact, efficient.

Statistics are too often used to make excuses, not to benefit email marketing campaigns. For example, to avoid misuse of statistics, marketing expert Avinash Kaushik suggests an interesting approach to email marketing metrics: apply a “so what?” test to each and every web metric you look at.

Email marketing is such an efficient marketing method because it, unlike other marketing channels, gives you hard to ignore, straight-to-the-point numbers on how you are doing with your email marketing campaigns.

A few email marketing metrics you can use to make your campaigns more efficient:

Conversion rate

The conversion rate is a down-to-earth statistic, which tells you how much the clients are investing in you.

The conversion rate is often mistaken for a meaningful email marketing statistic by itself. Well, it is nice if subscribers like your products, sure.
But if you sell $500 worth of products to 1% of your list, or $50 worth of products to 2% of your list, the conversion rate — although higher in the latter case — can lead you to believe that you are doing better in terms of money.

Here’s a well-known “secret”. You can boost the conversion rate by offering samples of your products, or trials if you are offering services. Give your clients a taste of what you really are.

Delivery rate

The email delivery rate is naturally amongst the most important email marketing’s metrics. Spam complaints, network failures and mistyped addresses all contribute to worsening your delivery rate. The industry standard delivery rate varies, depending on the niche, but it can be as high as 96%, and the overall number is continually improving in the industry.

To improve the delivery rate, follow basic email list hygiene procedures — purge your list from mistyped addresses, and reengage inactive subscribers. As email delivery is dependant on the quality of your email service provider, choose a reputable provider for sending your campaigns.

Open rate

The email open rate is another straight-forward statistic. The open rate is how many per cent of your subscribers (that have received your emails) actually open your emails. Now, it doesn’t mean that they read your emails — the subscribers simply open them.
The open rate tells how good you are in catching the subscriber’s attention. A good open rate also implies trust and recognition from the client.

If the recipient knows your address, he/she is likely to open the email you have sent–if the subject line is interesting, you will probably get an open as well. Also, if your email has numerous images and text, the recipient might not open the images (or they can be blocked by the email client), so you can become clueless as to whether the recipient has actually opened the email if you spice up your email with images.

Click-through rate (CTR)

The CTR of a campaign is how many subscribers from your list click on links in emails. The value is expressed in per cent. A high CTR means that you are doing good in personalizing your emails, and vice versa.

The “how do you improve your CTR?” question should be put this way: how do you write more appealing emails? You do it by making your emails personal, making your emails an experience. In short, making your emails a real conversation. For more about making articles more interesting, see our article on email personalization.

Unsubscribe rate

The unsubscribe rate, like the open rate, can signal if anything has gone wrong with your campaign. If your content has become weak, there will be a peak in unsubscribes. If your offers are too pushy, all the same.

Again, the unsubscribe rate signals that something is not right with your content. That means that you are most likely not sending what you were supposed to send to the subscriber. Segmentation, content revisions and new offers should keep the subscriber’s interest at bay.

Cost-Per-Click (CPC)

CPC is an email marketing metric that tells you how much you “pay” for each click a user makes. So let’s say your campaign costs $250 (money for copywriting, email marketing software, marketing, etc), and gets 50 clicks. You wind up paying $5 for a click — which would be quite reasonable for some businesses.

However, if you feel your CPC rate is too high, you should either reduce your costs or revise your content, emphasizing clear calls to action.

Statistics without a proper context are what they are: mere numbers; what actually counts is what you do with these numbers.

Which is the most important email marketing metric for you?

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Email campaign click through rate: what it is and how to improve it

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

Email Click Through RateAn email click through rate (CTR) is the ratio of clicks through your site in received emails. The CTR can provide you valuable information as to whether your campaign is successful or needs some work.

The CTR is, however, quite an obscure measure: a vast array of factors can influence the click through rate–including factors that you can’t directly measure and affect.

For example, the CTR depends not only on the subject lines (they foremost affect the email open rate) and shiny copy.
Subtler things like link position, time of the day, email length, link emphasis, etc., play a large role in making the CTR what it is. These external factors play a role significantly larger than you’d like them to.

Things that an email click through can tell about your campaign

The average email click through rate is perhaps the first statistic to look at when weighing the efficiency of a particular email campaign–maybe after the email open rate. A good email campaign will have a higher click through rate, but a lower CTR doesn’t mean that the campaign is bad–it merely suggests adjustments, which can make a huge turn.

The average email click through rate depends heavily on the niche, and the nature of your newsletter.

If you are selling products to consumers through email i.e. you own a “B2C” newsletter, the click through rate can be as low as 2-3%.

The average click through rate for business-to-business (B2B) newsletters is a pinch higher, starting from about 5%.

If your CTR has stayed average, or below the average, for some time, there’s email optimization that needs to be done. For example, maybe your emails contain so much content that the user has no real reason to click through?

Common tactics that improve the email click through rate

There are two roads you can take in order to improve the CTR.

First of all, you can look back to campaigns that provided the best results and try to copy the way you used to be. That, sadly, doesn’t always work, but can serve as a temporary fix; plus, looking back is healthy as you can see the emails with a fresh, more experienced look.

You can also take the hard road and try bettering the campaign altogether.
Spice up the content; send out only a truly relevant email newsletter; make your call to action stronger so the client knows what you want. In other words, try making the campaign as attractive as possible, and give a real reason for the user to click to reach your website.

You should pay special attention to the content: sprinkle links generously as more links tend to increase the CTR–adding a single extra link can make users click through your web a whopping 25% more. This doesn’t mean that you have to fill the email with links, though. That’s needy.

Remember that in this business you are fighting for every single click! Use everything you’ve got and take your best shot. The returns are worth it.

We would like to hear your experience with CTR, things that you’ve done to improve the numbers. Have you had over 20% click-through, if so maybe you can share your tricks!

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Posted in Email Marketing Metrics | 1 Comment »

E-mail open rate ABC

Thursday, December 2nd, 2010

Email Open RatesThere are equally many clients who ask “advanced” questions about e-mail marketing as there are clients who ask “beginner” questions. You know, there’s no harm in being new to something.

If e-mail open rates look like mere numbers and double-dutch to you, read on. We’ll explain.

What is an email open rate?

The open rate is the average of opened emails divided by the delivered sent emails.

We know when an e-mail is opened by placing a unique bacon HTML tracking code inside e-mails. The code downloads a tiny image or beacon from our webserver, which in turn signals that this particular e-mail is delivered. The statistic is then inserted in our database.

We count only delivered e-mails, while bounced e-mails are shown as bounce-reate in the statistics.

So, to reiterate, the average email open rate is the number of opened e-mails divided by the number of delivered e-mails.

Benchmarking email open rates

Broadly speaking, an open rate of about 20 to 40 percent is OK. The average open rates vary from niche to niche and heavily depend on the effectiveness of “subject” and “from” lines.

For example, the email open rates industry standard for health-related newsletters is around 30 percent, but people who receive e-mail from governmental e-mail lists usually open around 40 percent of their e-mails.

You can influence an e-mail open rate, but a number higher than around 70 to 80 percent would be, well, shocking. It’s not that people are disinterested in receiving e-mail; the number is like that because nowadays there is so much e-mail.

Besides, people who read your e-mail in e.g. Outlook, Gmail or on smartphones, often don’t show up in the statistics, because the e-mail browser doesn’t allow images to be included into e-mails.

The numbers can be quite plain-looking, especially if you realize that merely around 80 per cent of the emails are delivered at all. However, e-mail marketing is more of a middle way of marketing–it’s not based on masses, but rather individuals, yet not individually. That’s why an open rate, quite like the delivery rate, is not the most important statistic in e-mail marketing.

How to get a good email open rate

Well, here’s where the opinion varies; there are many techniques that will help you increase the respondents’ open rate. Some work better in one case, some in another.

  • First of all, send targeted e-mail. A targeted email list is bound to be more interesting to recipients, because the subject is interesting to them. Sending relevant email newsletter is, by the way, one of the “best practices” of e-mail marketing–so here’s to study more. You can target your users better by dividing them into segments.
  • Secondly, polish your “from” and “subject” lines. Of course, you shouldn’t retort to sending e-mail with a fake headline; such e-mail will make your brand’s trust diminish immediately. But try your best to spark the recipients’ attention.
  • Lastly, make long-term conclusions. There are external factors that influence the open rate–and even the weather can be one of them. If your open rate drops 2 per cent in a single campaign, don’t panic. If it does drop 2 per cent in the term of a year, maybe you ought to try something different.

Overview

A good email open rate doesn’t tell you a whole lot, but it is an important statistic, because email open rates can give you and edge against your competitors if you make the right conclusions.

For example, comparing two different types of e-mail you’ve sent, or evaluating your overall performance is quite easy if you have access to the average open rate.

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Posted in Email Marketing Campaign, Email Marketing Metrics | 2 Comments »

Analyzing email marketing campaign results

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

Email Campaign Tracking & reportIf you’ve already sent an email marketing campaign, chances are that you are at least familiar with the process of email campaign tracking, and have analyzed the statistics you got from your campaign.

However, the analysis of acquired data doesn’t stop with open rates or the average clickthrough rate (CTR).

Overall analysis

When a campaign has concluded, take a look at the obvious data: the open rates and the CTR. The open rate can be somewhere from 20 to 40 percent, but we can’t give an exact number for the CTR, hence the CTR relies heavily on the composition of your content, how well you write, etc; as a rule of thumb, CTR is best measured relatively to other campaigns.

If the open rate is well below 20 percent, the campaign has failed, and you should review the fundamentals: are the “Subject” and “From” fields in order? Is your audience targeted enough? Is every single e-mail delivered or are there broken e-mail addresses?

Then have a look at the unsubscribe amount; if the number has soared without no apparent reason, you might be sending e-mails too often, or need to re-think the branding of your e-mail campaign.

The CTR is a bit controversial: if it’s high, it’s good, right?

Ultimately, you want to pay attention only to the clicks that go to a landing page. A big clickthrough rate is good, because it shows that your readers pay attention to what you have to say, though you might want to adjust the layout or the content of your e-mails if people don’t click what you want them to click.

The sending time is also crucial: are your subscribers located in a single time zone? Are they spread out? What sending time generates the most opens?

As a rule, you shouldn’t send e-mail on Monday mornings and from Friday to Sunday; around those times e-mails are more likely to drown in the already full inbox. As for the “ideal” sending time, determining it is entirely deductive–just follow what works for you and experiment a bit.

In-depth analysis

Analyzing campaigns doesn’t stop at the obvious.

Good analytics software will let you know other important factors. For example, the average time spent on the site (or not spent), is a good indicator of how well your landing page integrates with your email campaign.

If the time spent on your site is too small (or many users bounce), you might want to adjust the design and content of your landing page to look more like your e-mails do.

If the time spent on your landing page is large, but there are still few conversions, you might want to add clearer calls to action. The email call to action should create a sense of urgency within the reader; long time spent on the site indicates interest, but also shows that the readers can’t make up their minds (hint: it’s you who has to make up their minds).

What to do with your data

An email campaign report is merely a guide, from which you have to extract useful information.

You should divide your users into segments according to the data you analyzed. You could, for example, create a separate email marketing landing page for users who spend a lot of time on the landing page, and include urgent calls to action in the page.

Here you decide what you need to correct, and why. Be careful, though, and pay attention only to the “big picture”, as individual statistics are what they are: mere numbers.

Conclusion

When all is said and done, you’re finally ready to send out your new campaign. Go ahead, send it. Then learn from the results once again. E-mail marketing is a long-term process; it involves long-term thinking and focuses on long term results.

By continuously improving your campaign, you’ll be able to achieve the long-term results everyone is longing for. Each time when you analyze email campaign, you’ll become better at recognizing all the subtle things that make an e-mail marketing campaign successful.

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Posted in Campaign Optimization, Email Marketing Campaign | No Comments »

Email Newsletter Response Rates

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

In the chart below you can see how B2B email newsletters perform against B2C newsletters in open rates, click-through rates and conversion rates.

Almost 1,500 marketers have provided their input in determining the numbers below, and they found that email newsletters usually contain more links to information and offers than non-newsletter emails. Because of this fact, click-through and conversion rates become important as indicators of email newsletter performance.

Email newsletters to consumers or B2C have an edge over B2B newsletters in terms of response rate performance across the board.

email-response-rates

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Highly Effective Email Marketing Tactics

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

Following post about Email List Targeting and Segmentation, we think sharing some statistical data would very well serve as indicator how important segmentation really is.

In the chart below you can see how effective are different email marketing tactics rated by B2B and B2C marketers.

Delivering content relevant to a segment – has been rated as the highest in terms of tactical effectiveness.

Even though relevant content is rated the highest, “email campaigns to house list” is most cost effective tactic because it requires less effort and costs less to achieve high levels of effectiveness. You should definitely harvest your email list and keep it satisfied while delivering the best content to specific segments, in this way you will ensure your email marketing success.

effective email tactics

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