Unsure of how successful your email marketing is? Overwhelmed by too many statistics? Numbers aren’t everyone’s friend, but understanding your key metrics can have incredible benefits for you, your audience and your overall branding, especially if you are just starting out with email marketing. You’ll have a greater insight into what content works, what your audience is interested in and be able to use this to better target your emails and entertain your subscribers. Here’s a breakdown of what it all means and why you should be using it to your advantage!
Send Time
Choosing the send time of your campaigns can have major influence on your campaign’s results. If you are sending campaigns out at 10pm on a Friday night, how well do you think that email will perform? As much as we hope subscriber loyalty will ensure our emails get read, you also need strategic planning to create a successful campaign.
Let’s say you’ve sent that Friday night campaign out and the open rates were low. Take a further look into when people actually opened your email. If you find that most people opened the email on Saturday morning, that’s a great sign! These statistics are giving you an insight into the best time to reach your audience.
Open Rates
Open rates can also prove the effectiveness of subject lines as well as a way to further understand your subscriber loyalty. If you have a high open rate but no engagement, you can see that your audience was interested but there was no further activity. Go back to the drawing board to create new call to actions, engaging content and imagery to inspire action. Click rates are another great indicator of engagement with your subscribers. It allows you to understand the types of content that your audience enjoys so that you know what to focus on in the future, or what you should leave out.
So what are the best open and click rates? If we had the winning number, we would share it, but unfortunately these rates are personalised to each company. Factors such as company size, frequency of email sends and your overall business model affect your open and click rates. B2B emails normally have slightly lower open rates in comparison to B2C which can be due to the unpersonalised nature of the campaign. Campaigns sent directly to consumers usually result in higher email performance as the campaigns may be more specific to the individual and can satisfy consumer wants and needs.
Bounce Rates
Unlike unsubscription rates, bounce rates should be kept as low as possible. High bounce rates occur when emails cannot be delivered and are usually an indicator of out-of-date subscriber lists. There’s no point spending your time creating a masterpiece to only have half of your audience actually receive it! If your campaign has a high bounce rate, make sure you get your hands on the bounce report to understand how many are soft or hard bounces, the difference between a temporary or a permanent error. To ensure you have a low bounce rate, continue to update your subscriber data by exporting your CRM data. You can also send half yearly emails to customers to check that their details are correct. This will not only improve your bounce rate but give your company another reason to contact your clients!
If you aren’t up to date with your email performance, you’re missing out on an opportunity to develop a greater understanding of your subscribers. Still unsure what all of this data means for your email marketing? Let us know! We’d love to help.