Get Your Email Marketing Under Control

(The total number of worldwide email accounts is estimated to reach 4.9 billion by the end of 2017. )

Email marketing is an integral part of any online business. It can help you gain new customers and boost your revenue, but at the same time it can also be harmful if not used properly. Your emails need to be specially optimized, and that means knowing how people interact with them as well as being able to identify their strengths and weaknesses. Tracking your email marketing and keeping up to date with metrics can help you improve your email marketing strategies.

Why Email Marketing?

There are a few reasons why investing your time and money in email marketing can pay off:

• The total number of worldwide email accounts is estimated to reach 4.9 billion by the end of 2017.
• You reach your customers via their Inbox, a place that most of them visit on daily basis.
• Email is a stable open platform with quite a long history.
• Email marketing is cost-effective (for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average ROI is $38).
• 72% of people prefer to receive promotional content through email (compared to 17% who prefer social media).
• Email notifications about abandoned carts have a 40.5% open rate

What Metrics Define your Success?

(You need to take care mainly of Opens, Clicks and Unsubscribes.)

You need to take care mainly of Opens, Clicks and Unsubscribes. In short: Opens will tell you if the mail has a catchy subject line and if the receivers are interested in you. Clicks refers to whether or not the message content is relevant to the subscribers who opened the mail, while conversely Unsubscribes can indicate if something is wrong with your emails. let’s look a bit closer.

Open Rate

Basically: how many of your emails were opened? This number is great indicator of how well your email subject works and how interested people are in your company or product.

What’s the average?

This can depend on the specific industry, as well as other variables, but in general the average open rate is somewhere between 20 -30%.

3 Tips for improving your Open Rate:

1. Catchy Subject Line: do some A/B testing to find out what works, and focuse on proper SEO practices.
2. Personalise: an Autopilot survey revealed that consumers expect timely, knowledgeable, and personal content, and 72% said they are frustrated when they receive generic marketing that doesn’t relate to their interests or past purchases. What’s more, according to GetResponse, emails with personalized subjects averaged 26% higher open rates and over 130% higher CTRs than emails without personalized subject lines.” (Find more about personalisation here)
3. Send at the right time with the right frequency: open rates are influenced a lot by the day of the week and the time of the day, and this depends both on the industry and message you want to convey. Frequency is also an important factor: if you send emails too often it may result in a lower open rate and click through rate due to saturation, on the other hand not sending enough risks alienating your customer from your brand.

(Emails with personalized subjects averaged 26% higher open rates and over 130% higher CTRs)

Click Through Rate (CTR)

This number will show you how relevant the message content is to subscribers who open your emails. The percentage CTR tells you how many recipients out of one hundred clicked somewhere on your email message, and can give you a representative idea of how effective your email marketing is.

What’s the average?

The average CTR of an email campaign is around 3%, but again this number is relative to the specific industry.

3 Tips for improving your CTR:

1. Make your message mobile friendly: 48% of emails are opened on a smartphone
2. Send at the right time with the right frequency: as was mentioned above, picking the right time to send can be very beneficial. Generally, around 11 a.m. ET has the highest CTR for emails.
3. Make your buttons and links visually appealing and clickable (and ensure they work on other platforms, especially smartphones).

Unsubscribe Rate

This is the number of people who unsubscribed from your email list. If this number is high, it means something isn’t working with your email marketing strategy. Very often it’s because the content is not meeting the subscribers’ needs or you are sending emails too frequently and people feel a bit overloaded — 78% of consumers have unsubscribed from emails because a brand was sending them too many emails.

What’s the average?

Unsubscribe rates are best kept around 0.2 %.

3 Tips for lower Unsubscribe Rate:

1. Personalise: again and again, this is one of the best (and easiest) ways to keep your unsubscribe rates low by delivering emails that appeal directly to your customer base and their interests.
2. Email Frequency: offer customized email frequencies and perform case studies to ensure you are not overloading your subscribers.
3. Content: create original, customized, and quality content relevant to your target group — this will allow you to become a trusted source of information on a topic or product.

Email marketing tips

And finally two hot email marketing tips from eCommerce guys who know what they’re talking about:

Jan Lastuvka, co-founder and CEO of MonkeyData, a powerful analytics dashboard for your online store

I strongly believe that success in email marketing depends on a good segmentation strategy. It’s not a secret that segmented campaigns get many more opens and clicks. Working with data basis requires sacrifice it on more time, but it brings better results. There are many segmentation strategies worth trying, starting with the simplest one: by demographics, geographic area, and email engagement, and ending on more sophisticated ones like overall cost and amount spent. MonkeyData is designed to compile information about top customers (incl. their email addresses) according to revenue. Such data can be easily exported and uploaded as a segment to any kind of email marketing platform.

Rytis Lauris, co-founder and CEO of Soundest, a globally renowned eCommerce email marketing solution

The dark horse of email marketing…

I think that automation is a buzzword. A lot of people are talking about it. We still see that small and medium online stores have not been taking 100% advantage of marketing automation. They may start using it, in the form of very basic workflows, but there is still a huge opportunity. It’s about combining email marketing with, for example, sending emails that lead to a specific landing page related to the campaign. When someone is doing some specific action on the landing page, then sending another email to customers.

Scratch cards are another great example. Sending an email with a scratch card in it, which opens to a landing page to be scratched, where you then get a discount code from an email. They go to your online store, use the discount code, complete the purchase. Then following up with an email that says “thank you”. It’s all about the flow. So far, the marketing automation being done is a bit separated from online stores, so I think it’s really the future for all this flow to be done together.