As marketing departments are decimated with layoffs, now is the time to utilize your most effective and revenue generating marketing channels. Although the death of email has been proclaimed for decades, email marketing is your most effective marketing tool to drive revenue, communicate with interested customers and share your latest news, products, and services with an audience that already knows you.
Acquiring new customers costs 5 times more than retaining an existing customer and is the driving reason for you to continue to optimize your email marketing channel in a time of crisis. Here are some statistics about email marketing:
- For every $1 you spend, expect $44 in return
- 99% of consumers check their email every day
- 59% of shoppers say email influences purchases
- US marketers will spend $350 million on email in 2019
As a measurable marketing agency, we love using email to drive our clients lead generation and revenue. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Below are some important email marketing metrics you should be measuring and managing for your email channel.
Email Marketing Metrics
Open Rate: Your subject line will drive a higher open rate for your email marketing campaign. If the subject line is relevant, not spammy and piques the recipients’ interest then you have a winner. An open rate between 20 – 25% means you have an effective email strategy. If the email open rate is 5% – 10% then you need to examine your program and find areas to improve.
Repeat Open Rate: Wondering if a prospect is hot or cold? Look to the number of times they opened your email and you got a hot lead there my friend. They found the email valuable, kept engaging with it and clearly experienced something they found valuable to them.
Link Clicks: This goes right along with repeat open rate. Someone opened your email, now what? Tracking clicks within your email indicates they are interested in your content. Whether it is a bundled product offer, a short video (spoiler alert, videos get the most clicks) or an article, measuring the link clicks will inform you about which content, offers, etc. perform best for your audience so you can replicate that success.
Click Through Rate: Email marketers love to brag about their statistics. Because email marketing is extremely measurable, it is important to measure the performance of your email campaign and your CTR can give you a quick indication if your campaign is performing.
What is a click through rate? Your email click through rate is determined by the number of email subscribers that have clicked on at least one link in your email. To calculate the CTR, take the number of recipients that have clicked on your email campaign and divide that with the number of emails you have sent.
Unsubscribers: No one likes rejection but unfortunately that is part of email marketing. Simply put, the people you are sending emails to are asking to be removed from your list and not receive future emails. If you have a high rate of unsubscribers then you need to examine your email strategy because your content is not a match, the subject line is not performing, and the send time may be way off.
Conversions: Typical email marketing ROI is 122%. What is the ROI of your out-of-home, radio, TV, or print advertising? Most likely you will not be able to measure the ROI of those traditional advertising channels like you can email marketing. How many people are downloading your offer or buying product from your email? Those are the conversions that drive sales and allow you to continue to improve your email marketing program.
Total Opens vs. Unique Opens: What you measure is as important as how you measure the effectiveness of your email marketing program. If someone opens your email more than once it may mean that the send time was not optimal. However, it can also mean that your content was so valuable they kept going back to read it. If you have more opens from one recipient, then you have a good lead there to follow up with.
Opening Time: Knowing the time when an email recipient reads your email will help you improve your email marketing program. At Anvil we always recommend to test, test and then test some more. Testing the time and day you send your email will help you build a more effective and profitable email marketing program.
Bounce Rate: Everyone always asks, what is a bounce rate? The official definition is the percentage of email addresses in your email list that didn’t receive your email because it was returned to the server. Which is why your list should only include opted in subscribers. List rental is risky and will increase your bounce rate because the data is aging and not always scrubbed when you rent.
When is the best time to send an email?
Do your research but we were all told once that Tuesday mornings are the best time to send your email. If that is the case, then wouldn’t email only go out on Tuesday mornings? The real answer is to test and determine when is the best time to send YOUR email. Since everyone is home and statistics show 99% of email is read than spend more time focusing on the content and subject line of your email then when to send it.
How to write an email subject line?
This is the single most important line of copy to your email marketing campaign. Leave a subject line blank and it will go straight to the junk folder, never to be read. Make it a long subject line you will bore them before they can finish the sentence. You know your audience best, but rule of thumb is to keep it short, compelling, and engaging. In addition, you need to pay it off with your call to action (CTA) and deliver on that subject line promise.
With COVID-19 and the need to communicate with your customers more important than ever, you need to include these tips to improve your email marketing program and drive revenue.
Email Marketing Tips
- Make subscribing to your email easy. Add a form to your homepage and all social media account to increase email subscribers.
- Encourage subscribers to share and forward your emails. Include social sharing buttons and ‘email a friend’ button in your emails.
- Personalize all emails. We know your email is not a personal note from the CEO to Jane Smith, but it increases open rates and conversions when you personalize emails with their first name.
How to Build Your Email List?
- Create a new lead generation offer: Develop a free eBook or whitepaper and host it on a landing page asking for email address to download content.
- Add a CTA to the top of your Facebook business page: Link to a landing page that requires an email address for access to unique content
- Link to offers across your website that will capture email sign-ups: Make subscribing to your newsletter and other valuable content easy with clear CTA
- Your email list will naturally degrade approximately 22.5% each year
Email List Best Practices
- Segment your email list by persona, demographics, behavior, buying frequency, where they signed up
- Segmenting can increase revenue generated by 50%
- 42% of marketers DO NOT send targeted email messages
- Personalize all emails
- Remove unsubscribers
- Include your physical location in your email signature
- Don’t buy or rent emails
If you are struggling with your email marketing program, the expert team at Anvil will be able to get your email channel back on track to profitability. You can contact Mike Terry at mike@anvilmedia.com.