Emailing to your advertisers and business prospects is a great way to promote yourself as their media expert. You can remind, sell, notify, or inform them of your services. Businesses are leveraging new ways to email clients to close more sales on a daily basis. Whether you are brand new to email marketing or an expert, I would recommend MailChimp. The first 2000 Subscribers are free and AccountScout integrates with them. MailChimp can do almost any type of campaign you want to create. It is great for all types of users regardless of email marketing experience. MailChimp is scalably priced for subscriber counts greater than 2000.
If you have a need for much more “transactions” or “actions”, I would recommend using SendGrid. The email design is very simple to use, and they provide great API for developers. A transactional email is an email that is automatically sent based on a user’s action. Uber, Lyft, and large corporations use SendGrid because of their highly interactive software. Yet, for the majority of the people reading this, I would recommend starting by using MailChimp.
Terminology
For those of you that are new to email marketing, we’re going to go through the terminology you may hear:
- Sent: Total emails sent. This is every email that was sent from the outbox.
- Delivered: Every email that made it to the domain provided. The total amount of emails that made it to an inbox, spam, or other labeled category.
- Opens: Total amount of delivered emails that were open. Each time the delivered email was opened will count as an open. One recipient can open an email more than one time.
- The open rate is calculated by (Delivered Emails) / (Unique Opens)
- Unique Opens: The number of recipients that opened the email. Each recipient can only be counted as 1 or 0.
- Clicks: The recipients that open an email and click anything that has a link.
- The click-rate can be calculated by (Unique Opens) / (Unique Clicks)
- Unique Clicks: The number of recipients that open an email and click a link. Each recipient can only be counted as 1 or 0.
- Bounced: The number of emails that did not make it to the domain provided. The email provided either does not exist or did not allow the email to be delivered. It is more likely that the email does not exist.
- Bounce rate can be calculated by (1- ((Delivered) / (Sent))
- Unsubscribed: This is a really important part of email marketing that many people try to work-around. It is far better for you to have someone unsubscribe rather than mark you as Spam. Unsubscribe are recipients that click to be taken off your email list. You are not docked or blacklisted from unsubscribes. However, if you hide this button or make it difficult to click, recipients are more likely to “Mark as Spam” your email. If this happens, your domain takes a hit and has less of a chance of landing in someone else’s inbox.
These are the general metrics you will see and hear all the time in the email marketing world.
Curious how your email marketing results line up with the industry average? The average for all industries in 2019 is as followed:
- Open Rate: 23.67%
- Click Through Rate: 3.84%
- Click to open rate: 16.20%
- Unsubscribe rate: 0.23%
- Spam rate: 0.02%
If your rates don’t meet the industry average, don’t worry! Subscribe to our blog to be updated with tips for increasing your email marketing metrics. Keep reading to learn more about the two essentials of email marketing.
Email Marketing Strategy
Now let’s talk more about the strategy behind Email Marketing. We are going to start with the most important factor in email marketing:
- Making it to the inbox.
- Sender’s email should be your name@company.com
- Don’t buy email lists
- Regularly clean your email list. (If an email bounces, take it out of your list).
- Send high-quality content
- Avoid all CAPS
- Succinct subject lines
- Ink to link ratio (too many links is not good).
- Advice from Google
- Creating an effective email.
- Make it personal.
- Send from a name, not a company.
- Personalize greetings and subject lines. Hello “Tom”,
- Create content that encourages engagement.
- Images, videos.
- HTML over text.
- Make it personal.
- Subject line: Language that is action oriented to encourage a higher open rate.
Want better email Marketing Results? Join the AccountScout Facebook Group to see the best practices for Increasing Emails Delivered, Increase Opens, Increase Clicks, Increase post-click conversions.
Next week, we will be going into more detail about the best practices for creating a strong subject line. A well-written subject line makes a world of difference in increasing your open rate. In the meantime, if you did not know already, AccountScout is integrated with MailChimp. Go to Tools –> Marketing Campaign Tool.
Call 303-791-3301 to learn how you can start increasing revenue with the Marketing Campaign Tool. If you are active on service, you have access to this tool!