Newsletters
Your customers know they have subscribed to a regular update that will take them on a journey through your products and services whilst providing insight. Think of your email as a product in itself. Your customers aren’t buying it with their money, but they are buying it with something just as valuable: their time.
Make sure it provides value even if they don’t click through to your deal. No customer is going to buy every product or take up every service you offer; so they need to think of your newsletter as something that provides them value.
Marketing offers
These emails may well be sent more irregularly and they will probably be sent in addition to the regular emails your customers have signed up for. Make sure you keep it short and to the point. Ask yourself “is this of genuine value to our customers?” before you click the send button.
Announcements
Don’t abuse these types of emails. If your customers have consented to receive announcements they won’t be pleased if they get them every week. Save these types of emails for when you have a brand new product or service that will wow your customers, such as a new app, a new venue opening, or so on.
Sending your campaign
By this point, you’re now itching to click send. But don’t do it just yet. Here are some things to think about before you push the button…
When is the best time to send your email?
We all have times of the day when we tend to check our emails, and times when we’re run off our feet, or relaxing away from our inboxes.
The beauty of the internet is that it can reach people anywhere, but there are still time barriers to when your emails will get through.
ESPs like MailChimp have automation functions that calculate the optimal time to send your email based on the location of your list segment. Bear in mind that there’s no guarantee as to what is the perfect time. It will change from sector to sector, and the demographic of your list will also affect peak browsing times.
In terms of the day of the week on which to send your campaign, do your research for your industry and have an idea of why you’re sending your emails on a certain day.
It’s probably not a good idea to send emails on a weekend. A MailChimp study revealed that the start of the week and midweek perform the best.
Tracking your emarketing campaign & understanding the metrics
There is definitely an art to creating great marketing content, but there’s also a bit of a science to it as well. Like a scientist, you need to find ways to measure results to know if your project’s on track.
As with science, every experiment you carry out takes your closer to understanding how to market effectively.
There’s so much data out there on the web, so make sure you use it. But at the end of the day, your company has its own specific identity and you need to create an email marketing strategy that works for you.
Your ESP should provide tracking functionality. Here are some key metrics to monitor:
Open rates
An email is deemed to have been opened when either the image content of an email has rendered in your customer’s email client, or when a link has been clicked in the email. If a user hasn’t enabled your images it won’t register as an open.
You can calculate the open rate by dividing the amount of opened emails by the number of non-bounced emails sent, then multiplying by 100. Again, ESP’s like MailChimp or HubSpot can do this for you.
Click-through rate (CTR)
CTR measures the percentage of subscribers who clicked one or more links in your email. You can work this out by taking either the total number of clicks or the total amount of unique clicks (whichever you choose, be consistent) and dividing it by the number of delivered emails… then multiplying it by 100. CTRs are the bread and butter of campaign tracking metrics.
Unsubscribe rate
The unsubscribe rate is calculated with the same formula used for CTRs and measures the amount of unsubscribes compared to the amount of people who received your email.
What are good email marketing statistics? Your unsubscribe rate needs to be under 2% to be in keeping with industry norms, and you should aim to get it down to less than 1%.
When you first start sending to a new list, or it’s been a whilst since your last communication, your unsubscribe rate may be higher than this; over time it should settle around the <2% mark if you’ve got your strategy right.
Track emails with Google Analytics
You can engage in what’s called “beyond the click tracking” by using Google Analytics. It measures the source of traffic to your site. Each link in your email can be tracked to help get a picture of your user’s journey and actions after clicking through one of your emails.
HubSpot also has a sophisticated email tracking protocol that provides feedback as to how well your campaigns are performing.
You’ll want to be vigilant to ensure your campaigns aren’t clogging up spam filters, so make sure you make use of spam monitoring protocols. MailChimp, for example, has strict spam monitoring that will unsubscribe users who’ve reported spam and can lead to account suspension if too much abuse is reported. Remember, if you have to ask yourself how much email marketing is too much, then you are probably sending too many emails.
You can also use a deliverability optimiser like Litmus which will test your email against an up-to-date list of spam filters.
Email campaign automation
There are many different sophisticated ways you can automate your email campaigns.
Abandoned cart emails
A majority (67%) of eCommerce shopping carts are abandoned before a sale is completed, according to MailChimp.
However, you can set up an “abandoned cart automation workflow” that will automatically send a message reminding customers what they’ve left behind and encouraging them to complete their transaction.
Automated email coupons
You can also set up campaigns to automate outreach emails offering coupons and offers to engage with:
• Lapsed customers or inactive subscribers you want to win back
• Send people emails on their birthday, for the uber-personal touch…
For retailers and store owners in particular, you can also take advantage of automated holiday emails to flag up deals ahead of a bank holiday or, say, grab some of the Black Friday market…
Post-purchase emails
The good old follow up is a classic marketing technique that tells a customer that you value their experience even after you’ve taken their money. You can automate emails to send after a certain purchase has been made or if they’ve spent a certain amount of money.
Welcome email series
This is probably one of the most important and most basic forms of automated email messages. In today’s crowded online marketplace, you only have a short space of time between a prospect signing to your list and them either forgetting about you or getting drawn in to a more organised marketer’s sales funnel.
If you automate nothing else, you should automate the first few emails you want each customer to receive. This helps to introduce your brand, show you have value to offer them, and set them off on the start of their journey with you.
Marketing offers
These emails may well be sent more irregularly and they will probably be sent in addition to the regular emails your customers have signed up for. Make sure you keep it short and to the point. Ask yourself “is this of genuine value to our customers?” before you click the send button.
Announcements
Don’t abuse these types of emails. If your customers have consented to receive announcements they won’t be pleased if they get them every week. Save these types of emails for when you have a brand new product or service that will wow your customers, such as a new app, a new venue opening, or so on.
Sending your campaign
By this point, you’re now itching to click send. But don’t do it just yet. Here are some things to think about before you push the button…
When is the best time to send your email?
We all have times of the day when we tend to check our emails, and times when we’re run off our feet, or relaxing away from our inboxes.
The beauty of the internet is that it can reach people anywhere, but there are still time barriers to when your emails will get through.
ESPs like MailChimp have automation functions that calculate the optimal time to send your email based on the location of your list segment. Bear in mind that there’s no guarantee as to what is the perfect time. It will change from sector to sector, and the demographic of your list will also affect peak browsing times.
In terms of the day of the week on which to send your campaign, do your research for your industry and have an idea of why you’re sending your emails on a certain day.
It’s probably not a good idea to send emails on a weekend. A MailChimp study revealed that the start of the week and midweek perform the best.
Tracking your emarketing campaign & understanding the metrics
There is definitely an art to creating great marketing content, but there’s also a bit of a science to it as well. Like a scientist, you need to find ways to measure results to know if your project’s on track.
As with science, every experiment you carry out takes your closer to understanding how to market effectively.
There’s so much data out there on the web, so make sure you use it. But at the end of the day, your company has its own specific identity and you need to create an email marketing strategy that works for you.
Your ESP should provide tracking functionality. Here are some key metrics to monitor:
Open rates
An email is deemed to have been opened when either the image content of an email has rendered in your customer’s email client, or when a link has been clicked in the email. If a user hasn’t enabled your images it won’t register as an open.
You can calculate the open rate by dividing the amount of opened emails by the number of non-bounced emails sent, then multiplying by 100. Again, ESP’s like MailChimp or HubSpot can do this for you.
Click-through rate (CTR)
CTR measures the percentage of subscribers who clicked one or more links in your email. You can work this out by taking either the total number of clicks or the total amount of unique clicks (whichever you choose, be consistent) and dividing it by the number of delivered emails… then multiplying it by 100. CTRs are the bread and butter of campaign tracking metrics.
Unsubscribe rate
The unsubscribe rate is calculated with the same formula used for CTRs and measures the amount of unsubscribes compared to the amount of people who received your email.
What are good email marketing statistics? Your unsubscribe rate needs to be under 2% to be in keeping with industry norms, and you should aim to get it down to less than 1%.
When you first start sending to a new list, or it’s been a whilst since your last communication, your unsubscribe rate may be higher than this; over time it should settle around the <2% mark if you’ve got your strategy right.
Track emails with Google Analytics
You can engage in what’s called “beyond the click tracking” by using Google Analytics. It measures the source of traffic to your site. Each link in your email can be tracked to help get a picture of your user’s journey and actions after clicking through one of your emails.
HubSpot also has a sophisticated email tracking protocol that provides feedback as to how well your campaigns are performing.
You’ll want to be vigilant to ensure your campaigns aren’t clogging up spam filters, so make sure you make use of spam monitoring protocols. MailChimp, for example, has strict spam monitoring that will unsubscribe users who’ve reported spam and can lead to account suspension if too much abuse is reported. Remember, if you have to ask yourself how much email marketing is too much, then you are probably sending too many emails.
You can also use a deliverability optimiser like Litmus which will test your email against an up-to-date list of spam filters.
Email campaign automation
There are many different sophisticated ways you can automate your email campaigns.
Abandoned cart emails
A majority (67%) of eCommerce shopping carts are abandoned before a sale is completed, according to MailChimp.
However, you can set up an “abandoned cart automation workflow” that will automatically send a message reminding customers what they’ve left behind and encouraging them to complete their transaction.
Automated email coupons
You can also set up campaigns to automate outreach emails offering coupons and offers to engage with:
• Lapsed customers or inactive subscribers you want to win back
• Send people emails on their birthday, for the uber-personal touch…
For retailers and store owners in particular, you can also take advantage of automated holiday emails to flag up deals ahead of a bank holiday or, say, grab some of the Black Friday market…
Post-purchase emails
The good old follow up is a classic marketing technique that tells a customer that you value their experience even after you’ve taken their money. You can automate emails to send after a certain purchase has been made or if they’ve spent a certain amount of money.
Welcome email series
This is probably one of the most important and most basic forms of automated email messages. In today’s crowded online marketplace, you only have a short space of time between a prospect signing to your list and them either forgetting about you or getting drawn in to a more organised marketer’s sales funnel.
If you automate nothing else, you should automate the first few emails you want each customer to receive. This helps to introduce your brand, show you have value to offer them, and set them off on the start of their journey with you.
