Email marketing is like any other type of marketing; it has success criteria that you can observe to understand how successful you are at it.
1. The rate at which messages are opened
What is meant by the message opening rate here is how many users open the message sent out of every hundred users who receive the message. For example, if you have a mailing list consisting of 100 users, and you send a message, and you get an opening rate of 15%, this means that there are 15 users who opened the message of the 100 users who received it.
When the open rate is between 20-25%, then this means that you have an effective strategy, and if your email open rate is 5-10%, then you need to examine your program and find areas for improvement. To calculate the click-through rate, take the number of recipients who clicked on your message and divide that by the number of emails you sent. Of course, there are many factors that contribute to the increase in the rate of messages being opened, such as:
- How was the mailing list built from scratch?
- How reliable a business or brand is.
- The title of the message and its attractiveness.
2. Repeat opening messages
Are you wondering if potential customers are interested or not? Look at how many times they opened your message. If the number is large, then this means that they found your email valuable and continued to deal with it, and it is clear that they experienced something that they found valuable to them. It is also important to measure the time that the user spent reading the message. The frequency of opening messages depends primarily on the trust that you have to build between yourself and your users.
3. Uses the message’s links.
This is consistent with our high open rate.Someone opened your email; now what? Tracking clicks in your email indicates that users are interested in your content, whether it’s an aggregated product demo, an article, or a short video (note: videos get the most clicks). Measuring link clicks will let you know what content and offers your audience likes and then help you improve your way of placing links in messages. Also, the percentage of those who clicked on the links must be measured out of the total number of those who opened the message. According to our previous example, if the message was opened by 15 users, how many of them clicked on the links in the message?
4. Unsubscribe rate
No one likes to be rejected, but unfortunately this is part of email marketing, and the unsubscribe rate is simply the percentage of those who unsubscribe from the total number of people who received the message. In our previous example, if 3 percent unsubscribed, here the unsubscribe rate is 3%.
If you have a high unsubscribe rate, then you need to examine your email marketing strategy because perhaps your content is not very interesting or your topic title is unattractive.
5. Conversion rate
Email conversion rate is one of the best “macro” KPIs you can determine, while some prefer to focus on overall profitability or return on investment. The typical return on investment for email marketing is 122%. Do you know, my dear, what is the return on investment for your advertisements outside the home, whether on radio, television, or print? Let me tell you, you probably won’t be able to measure the ROI of traditional advertising channels like email marketing.
The number of people who download your offer or purchase a product from your email—these are the conversions that drive sales and allow you to continue to improve your email marketing program. To apply our previous example, how many of the 15 people who opened the message will purchase your product (if the message contains a purchase link, for example)?
How do I improve email conversion rates?
There are two main ways to improve conversion rates:
- Improve the personalization of your offering with the right omnichannel and segmentation strategies.
- You can improve the mechanics of the presentations themselves (implementing best practices such as submission times, message headers, etc.).
How do you write an attractive email address to improve your open, click, and conversion rates?
The message title is the most important line in the entire content of your email, so you should follow the recommendations of experts, including:
- Never send an email without an address, because this leaves a bad impression on the user, and free email services (such as Gmail) classify it as spam.
- Do not send an email with a title that is too long or too short, because this leaves a bad impression on the user.
- Do not send an email with a deceptive address to increase the open rate, because this will negatively affect it in the long run.
- Include the username of the email address.
- Use the question form to pique your users’ curiosity.
- Keep the title simple and focused on the topic.
- Use an intriguing and shocking headline, for example, “Your marketing plan is failing because you are not thinking in the right direction” (a great title for a blog about e-marketing).
- Do not write a title that reveals the content of the message.
- Use numbers if possible.
The most important sites that provide email marketing services
As we mentioned above, the job of email marketing service providers includes building a complete system for recording and saving subscriber data as well as controlling and managing the message sending system automatically. In short, email services provide you with everything you need from a technical point of view in order to start marketing via email, and here are briefly some of the most important features that email services give you through your account with them:
- Email marketing services are a storage unit for users who are subscribed to your mailing lists.
- Provides templates for user data capture forms.
- It provides you with the ability to automatically send messages that you want to send according to orders you specify.
- It includes templates and HTML message templates that can be customized.
- It provides you with accurate statistics on the rates of opening messages, clicking on links, unsubscribing, etc.
- provides you with the ability to upload and use ready-made mailing lists (according to certain conditions).
- provides you with the ability to make a copy of your mailing lists.
Of course, each company has different features, and perhaps in some companies you will find more features. Most companies provide monthly paid plans, according to the size of the mailing list, but some companies provide free plans with very limited capabilities.
Here is a list of the most important and popular email marketing service providers:
- Moosend
- Omnisend
- GetResponse
- ConvertKit
- HubSpot
- ConstantContact
- mailchimp
- iContact
- AWeber
Tips for success in email marketing
1. Make it easy to subscribe to your email; add a form to your homepage and all your social media accounts to get more subscribers.
2. Encourage your subscribers to share and forward your emails.
3. Include social sharing buttons and an “email a friend” button in your emails.
4. Personalize all your emails. When you personalize your emails with your username, it increases your open rates and conversions.
5. Send your promotional messages at the right time; for example, the beginning of the month is the right time for marketing, and Thursday is the right time for luxury, etc.
6. Never neglect to follow up on the results of your marketing campaigns and do more tests and experiments to get the best possible results.
Always remember that tracking and analysis are one of the basics of e-marketing in general.
7. Avoid using words that are classified as spam (such as free, get, money, etc.). Do a search for all the words.
8. Avoid using practices that are classified as spam, such as adding more links in the message.
9. Don’t overwhelm your mailing list subscribers with messages; one effective weekly or even monthly message is better than one every day that leaves an annoying effect on the user.
10. Deal with your mailing list on the basis that it represents people, so always make sure to build a relationship and try to appear as an assistant, not a marketer.
11. Think about how the average consumer interacts with a brand these days. Buying is not linear. Many times buyers interact with you through multiple channels – email, apps, social media – before making a purchase.
Read also: What do you need to start Email Marketing
