You may spend countless hours every week working hard to build your email list.
But have you ever stopped to think about how your campaigns perform?
You can have the largest list in your space, but if your email marketing metrics aren’t performing as they should, you may have to rethink everything you do, from your list-building efforts to your campaigns.
From this episode, you’ll learn what email metrics you should track and how to improve them.
Tune in!
Useful links:
Create beautiful email signup forms, coupon boxes, and pop-up surveys for your store with Getsitecontrol.
You may spend countless hours every week working hard to build your email list.
But have you ever stopped to think about how your campaigns perform?
You can have the largest list in your space, but if your email marketing metrics aren’t performing as they should, you may have to rethink everything you do, from your list-building efforts to your campaigns.
From this episode, you’ll learn what email metrics you should track and how to improve them.
Tune in!
Useful links:
Create beautiful email signup forms, coupon boxes, and pop-up surveys for your store with Getsitecontrol.
Hi,
You’re listening to Getsitecontrol Insider, a monthly podcast where we share marketing advice for ecommerce brands.
In this episode, we’re talking about email marketing metrics: what metrics you should be tracking for your business, and how you can improve them to ultimately boost your email marketing ROI.
Let’s get started.
You can have the largest email list in your space, but if your email marketing metrics aren’t performing as they should, you may have to rethink everything you do, from your list-building efforts to your campaigns.
So what email marketing metrics should you be tracking?
For most ecommerce businesses, there are ten key crucial metrics to keep an eye on:
● List growth rate, which measures the rate at which your email list grows
● Deliverability, which defines the number of emails that were delivered to the servers of your recipients’ email service providers
● Open rate -- indicates the number of people who opened your email from all of your recipients
● Click-through rate (or CTR) -- calculates the percentage of recipients who clicked on at least one link in your email
● Click-to-open rate (CTOR) -- defines the percentage of link clicks from people who have opened your email
● Bounce rate measures the percentage of emails that weren’t delivered successfully
● Unsubscribe rate indicates the percentage of recipients who unsubscribed from your lists
● Spam rate measures how often your subscribers mark your emails as spam
● Conversion rate calculates the percentage of recipients who completed the desired action after clicking on an email link
● And ROI, which defines the financial return of your investment in your email marketing efforts
To be clear, you don’t have to work on these ten metrics at once. You can even ignore some of them if you don’t think they’re relevant to your objectives.
You should still pick at least one metric you think is hurting your company and improve it by following one of the next five practices.
Number 1. Grow your email list consistently
One common obsession marketers have regarding their email campaigns is their list growth.
This makes sense, because the larger your list, the more revenue you should generate from it.
The solution to growing your email list steadily is to run list-building campaigns, such as:
● Offering discounts and coupons
● Running contests and giveaway
● Targeting exiting visitors with time-sensitive offers
● Handing out lead magnets, such as an ebooks, catalogs, gift lists, and so on
The keys to running a successful list building campaign lies in two things:
· offering something relevant and useful for your visitors
· and promoting your offers using proven opt-in methods
Your offers represent everything you give to your visitors to entice them to become subscribers. They are the core of your list-building campaigns. No matter what promotional method you use, the success of your campaigns hinges on your offers.
For an ecommerce store, some great list-building offers are:
● Access to exclusive perks
● First-purchase discounts
● Free shipping coupons
● Helpful information (like a buyer’s guide)
Whatever offer you use, you must make sure they fit your brand and the visitor’s current stage of their journey.
For example, a first-time coupon is ideal for brands with simple products and visitors with multiple visits but no purchases. On the other hand, a buyer’s guide is better suited for people who’re still not ready to buy an expensive or complex product (e.g., a gadget, a health device).
As for the promotional methods, you can use a mix of:
● Banners and embedded opt-in forms
● Dynamic opt-in forms such as popups and slide-ins
● Organic social media posts
● And paid social media posts
Practice #2. Clean your list regularly
It’s uber important to grow your email list, but if you expect your subscribers to become your buyers, quality trumps quantity.
It’s much better to have 1,000 qualified, relevant subscribers who want to hear from your brand than 10,000 who barely know you.
Not only is a smaller, higher-quality list more profitable, but it’s also cheaper to manage and will give you fewer headaches.
When you email people who don’t like your brand, they may end up reporting you as spam. As a consequence, your deliverability and open rates will likely decrease. Your email address may even end up in a blacklist.
The solution? Cleaning your list of subscribers who don’t seem interested in your emails. That can be:
● Email addresses that bounce
● Subscribers who haven’t opened an email in over 90 days
● Subscribers who haven’t taken action, like clicking a link, in over 90 days
It may seem harsh, but removing subscribers works. Here’s how you can do that:
From there, consider sending a re-engagement campaign to this list, telling them that you’ll delete them from your database if they don’t open or reply to your emails. You can also tell them to unsubscribe willingly.
Once your campaign is over, you can delete those who didn’t reply, click, or unsubscribe.
(If you want to know how to craft a re-engagement email campaign, check the link in the description)
Practice #3. Create the perfect first impression
Email is a time-scarce medium. You’ve got a few seconds to make your subscribers open, read, and click through your emails. Especially during the first few weeks after they’ve subscribed.
To create a great first impression fast, you must start with subject lines.
Your subject line is the “implied promise” of your email — something the subscriber wants that makes them want to open it. This doesn’t have to be complicated — if you are doing a promotion, make it clear what it is about.
Another way to make a great first impression is to test different “From” names. Usually overlooked, the “From” name can make your brand stand out, thus increasing your open rates.
For example, you could change your “From” name from a generic brand name to a personal one from one of the founders.
Finally, you want to optimize the preview text; the text that shows up next or below a subject line and which gives more context to the email’s contents.
Think of the preview text as a support to the subject line. It should give some idea of what the email is about without saying exactly what it is.
Try to connect your preview text to your subject line, expanding on the promise and what the subscribers can expect to see in your email – and then fulfill that promise within the email.
Practice #4. Use segmentation and personalization
There are many tricks and hacks to improve your click-through rate, but nothing beats relevance.
The more relevant your emails are, the better they will perform. After all, everybody wants to read an email that’s useful for them.
To do that, you can leverage your visitor and customer data.
For example, you can use:
You can collect all of this information without much work. For example, if your visitors create an account or make a purchase, they may need to provide some information you can use in your campaigns.
Since you can collect an almost unlimited amount of data, you want to start by defining what you want to know about your visitors. Once you know that, collecting the data will be much easier.
As you collect the data, you want to segment your subscribers around any of the following four categories:
For example, you can send emails of your customers based on the amount of money they spend, the products they have liked or bought, or their purchase frequency.
Lastly, you can send emails targeting certain customer behaviors, such as abandoned cart emails targeting those who left a product in the cart, or emails to loyal customers targeting those who buy from you regularly.
As you segment your campaigns based on any of these attributes, your open rates, click-through rates, and conversions will improve.
Practice #5. Maximize your conversions
There are two tricks that can help you maximize conversions when your strategy is already working:
Leveraging urgency and Focusing your emails on one offer
Let’s start with the first one
Urgency highlights the scarcity of a given offer, whether a discount or a product’s stock, making the offer more valuable.
Two main ways to use urgency are by making your discounts:
Either of these two strategies works. What matters is that you leverage urgency whenever you can.
Another way to maximize your conversions is to focus your emails on one offer at a time.
Usually, retail brands send emails with multiple competing offers, products, and goals at once. For large brands, it may be hard not to do so. But for a smaller brand like yours, this may not work.
Instead of promoting multiple offers at once, you can save time and increase your CTR by making your emails about one offer.
Whether that’s a discount, a sale, a new product line, or anything else you may want to promote, your offer should be clear enough so that your subscribers can understand what it is right away -- and click to your website.
There are no magic tricks when it comes to improving your email marketing metrics.
To see high open rates, CTRs, and conversions, you must start by building a list of engaged, interested subscribers.
Then, you want to segment your campaigns and personalize your emails – while leveraging hacks that increase conversions.
Improving the performance of your email marketing metrics may not be a quick fix. But if you follow this advice, you should notice the difference in no time.
Find more tips and hacks in the description of this episode.
Thank you for listening,
Until next time