Sending out emails can be frustrating when you don’t know if they are getting you anywhere, or if you’re reaching anyone.
Fortunately, both of these problems can be solved if you successfully track the response data of what you are sending.
By looking at numbers such as your open rate, click rate, and conversion rate, you can get a sense of how well your marketing emails work.
Open Rate
Not sure how to get more people to actually open your email? Whether you are a small business start-up or a Fortune 500 company, there are ways to increase your open rate and your overall impact.
How to increase your open rate:
- Test your subject line. A good way to find out what resonates with your audience is to send out A/B email campaigns that contain different subject lines. The most effective subject lines are clear and concise, but making different variations can increase your open rates and help you learn more about your subscribers.
- Make it personalized! Adding the recipient’s name or location to the subject line can make your message more personal. This is shown to increase open rates for emails, especially when paired with transactional emails, birthday deals, and post-purchase follow-ups.
- Make it short and sweet. Many of your recipients are reading your emails on their mobile devices. We recommend you use no more than 9 words in your subject line.
- Segment your audience. Think about who your audience is, and define the needs of the different groups you’re reaching. What kind of information is most useful to them? Segmenting your audience can help you create content that’s relevant to them and builds trust with your subscribers.
Once you’ve got subscribers who actually open your emails, what do you do to make them take action?
Click Rate
It’s easy to track your click rates through the email platform you use. The hard part is getting people to actually click. Fortunately, there are time-tested ways to help drive the actions you are wanting your audience to take.
How to improve click rates:
- Be intentional about your content. Your click rate will be an indicator of how useful your subscribers find your campaign. To improve your audience’s engagement, you will want to create content that is highly valuable. Similar to open rates, this can be accomplished by segmenting your audience to target their specific interests.
- Make your link specific and concise. We recommend you avoid generic text like “click here.” Most people will not click here because they don’t know where it leads. A well-placed link with clear messaging will be more successful.
- Check the link. It is usually your goal with links to bring people to your website, but not every link should go to your homepage. Have your link bring your audience to the most relevant information on your site. If you are referencing a particular service in your email, your subscribers want to go to that particular page.
- Embed more links! Some have success with including multiple links to the same content within their campaign. You can do this in one of two ways.
-
- Campaigns with a single call to action may find better results by placing the same button in several areas throughout the email.
- Another way to do this is to vary the linked text throughout your campaign. Instead of having a single repeated call to action, you could have several, which increases the odds of someone clicking–even though every link points to the same target webpage. This can also be an indicator–similar to the test subjects–of what link wording resonates best with your audience.
Conversion Rate
So they’ve opened your email, they clicked on the button you wanted them to, but did they follow through with what you wanted? This is where your conversion rate becomes so important.
- Define a goal, and track it using KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Are you trying to increase sales calls? It is important to create goals (5 booked calls a month) and to monitor the KPI of your campaign as it relates to your goal (your conversion rate of links to book a call.) Getting aligned here is the most important step to getting to where you want to go.
- Unify your message. Your email’s content, call to action, and links should all lead people toward the same goal. Are you trying to bring more website traffic? Have each link bring people to the pages of your website, and let your content be a preview that people will want to learn more about by clicking on your links.
- Track the source of your clicks! There is a way to integrate your emails with web analytics. This helps you create tracking URLs that are unique to the email, and will help you know the source that brought someone to your website.
You have to measure in order to improve. In the end, in order to succeed, you must refine and optimize your email marketing campaigns to ensure maximum impact.
