Email marketing remains the lifeline of the digital marketing industry. Over the past year, all sectors have witnessed a significant increase in email volumes as more and more operate remotely. Competing technologies cannot beat the viability and everyday use of emails. It remains the preferred tool of communication for targeted outreach locally and globally. Business professionals all around the world use emails more than any other communication app.
So, have you stopped and evaluated the efficiency and success rate of your email marketing campaign? Is it possible that you might be sending out too many emails and repeating the same mundane process over and over again? Often businesses tend to shift the focus of marketing efforts to new channels and campaigns, assuming that the emails will get the job done independently. That is not the case at all.
Keeping tabs on how well your email marketing campaigns are performing is essential in evaluating the campaign’s results. A successful outbound marketing program takes into consideration every little detail of marketing initiatives.
The Open and Click Rates
This article discusses the secret to email marketing open and clicks rates by examining each individually.
What is Email Open Rate?
Simply put, the open email rate is how many times the subscribers have opened your emails. It is calculated as a percentage of the number of emails opened divided by the number of successfully sent emails. You can track whether or not your email is opened by using email marketing software. The results can often be misleading because subscribers may have blocked images, and the software will not decipher that.
The email open rate matters the most because it shows how many people are interested in what you say and offer. However, it can only serve as a metric and not be used for customer insights. It is still going to help you assess the success rate of your campaign to some extent and highlight the reach.
What is Click-to-Open Rate?
The click-to-open rate is essential in evaluating the relevancy of your email and the quality of the email list. It matters because it will significantly enhance the performance of your email campaign. If you have a low click-to-open rate, it could mean that the subscribers have seen the subject line before, so they will not even open the email.
However, some subscribers open all their emails, but chances are they won’t read it, so it is an inaccurate determinant of the click-to-open rate.
What is Click-Through Rate?
Email click-through rates will tell you how many times subscribers clicked on the links provided in your email. It is a crucial metric serving as a strong indicator of engagement and assessing the quality of your campaign. The rates can be tracked with a tracking domain and are more accurate than the open and click-through rates.
However, some campaigns are not designed to get clicks, such as transactional emails or privacy policy updates, so don’t mix up and compare the results to regular marketing campaigns.
Increasing Email Marketing Rates
Now that we have discussed what the open and click rates are all about. Let’s discuss what we can do to increase and optimize these rates.
Make Sure the Email Arrives
A well-written email can only be valuable if it arrives in the intended recipient’s inbox and they open it. It is a basic but somewhat routine check to ensure that your emails are not ending up in the spam or junk folders. If filters are becoming more aggressive, the emails need to be more direct and less generic. If the problem persists, your program might have issues with the delivery.
Whatever it is, get it fixed as soon as possible. When companies change their domain and IP addresses, many emails are sent to obsolete addresses and may not be alerted. So keep email deliverability as a KPI – Key Performance Indicator and check it every quarter.
Nail the CTA – Call to Action
Adding a CTA to your email is crucial to the campaign’s success and assessing the click-through rate. Following are a few ways you can include a compelling CTA in your email:
· Offer Only One CTA
When it comes to giving options to customers, less is more. The more choices you give, the more confused the customer will be. It also applies to CTA’s, and only one strong CTA should suffice.
· Place CTA on the Right
Gutenberg’s principle can explain it, and designers are putting it to use to focus on the email’s essential elements. Placing a CTA to the left is inconvenient because the reader will have to go back to the left to click on it.
· Add Directional Cues
Prompt CTA clicks by directional cues. These could be in the form of shapes such as arrows or prominent text colors such as red. Humans tend to follow the sight of others, including images of a person looking directly at the link will help establish the directional cue.
Segmenting Customers & Personalization is Key
Are you sending out your emails to everyone? It’s time to stop doing that. It means segmenting your customer list. Please understand that not everyone will be interested in opening your email, and you are much better off sending it to the people who find the information relevant.
You can do this by obtaining quality lists from trusted sources or organizations specializing in segmenting customers based on their unique demographics or doing the segmentation by yourself.
Once you have a clearer idea of what your target audience looks like, personalize the content accordingly and make it enjoyable. Personalization is an essential feature to boost the click rates of email marketing. It doesn’t mean bombarding the email with the customer’s name but also using your data about your critical demographic to tailor the marketing experience according to the customers’ needs.
Now that you are aware of the secrets of email marketing, we hope that you can successfully apply them to your campaign and boost up those open and click rates accordingly.
Clifford Woods
