3 Powerful Things You Must Know about Email Marketing | Direct Response Marketing
Three of the most overlooked, yet most powerful principles in email marketing all revolve around proper testing and tracking. In order to run a profitable email marketing campaign, you have to monitor, track and test a variety of email statistics such as your Open Rate, Click Through Rate (CTR), bounce rate, etc. By measuring and testing these statistics, you can consistently improve your results over time.
1. What Are the Most Important Email Marketing Metrics?
Open Rate - If you sent out 100 emails, out of those 100 emails how many would get opened? This number is your open rate. A high open rate indicates a list that believes your content is valuable.
Click Through Rate (CTR) - If 100 people opened your email, out of those 100 how many would click on a link in the email? Again, the higher this number is the more responsive and profitable your email list is.
Bounce Rate - If you sent out 100 emails, how many will "bounce," meaning how many will return undelivered? There are many reasons why an email might bounce. Some of these include invalid email addresses, the server was down, or that their email inbox was full.
These are some of the most basic statistics. Once you have these statistics, you can start tracking more advanced statistics such as conversion rates, campaign ROI, total sales, time of day to mail, etc.
2. Which Metric is the Most Important?
Every metric is important to some degree. However, the metric you should focus on depends entirely on what you want to accomplish.
If very few of your emails are getting opened, then focusing on your conversion rate or your click through rate wouldn't make very much sense. On the other hand, if your open rate is off the roof but you can't get anyone to buy anything, then that's a very different problem.
Each statistic will tell you something about your email list. For example, if you have a high open rate, that probably means you're either writing great titles or your list believes you'll deliver something valuable. If you then have trouble getting people to click through a link, chances are you haven't sold them on the benefits for them clicking on that link.
By carefully tracking your statistics and carefully choosing one to focus on then tackling it, you can quickly start to improve your overall bottom line profits.
3. The Importance of Having a Compelling Offer
Great marketers understand that even if you get your emails opened, unless someone clicks and buys something, chances are you're not going to make any money. Not only should you be paying attention to your open rates, but you should also be putting a lot of attention on your CTR as well.
In order to increase your CTR and your open rates, there are several key elements to focus on. These elements are:
Subject Line: Your subject line should grab attention and get them to open your email. Subject lines can be shocking, newsy, controversial or promise the user a benefit. Generally, the latter gets the highest open rates. Be careful not to over hype your email or your email could come off as spam.
Opening Sentence: The opening sentence is arguably the next most important sentence in your email. A good opening sentence "sells" your reader on reading the rest of your email. It should be very clear to them right from the get go what they will get from reading your email.
A Compelling Offer: It should be crystal clear to your reader what you're offering and why what you're offering is valuable, right from the get go. This is the crucial element that can really skyrocket your email marketing to success.
The Call to Action: Remember to ask for the order! Do it compellingly and language your email in such a way that assumes your users will click through.
How to Avoid Coming Off as Spam: Making sure your email doesn't get flagged as spam is an important part of a good open rate. Avoid using words like sex, free, cash, etc in your email and subject line. There are numerous "spam rating" checkers online you can use to check and see how likely your email is to come off as spam.
Email Layout: It's important to keep your layout consistent so that your readers know what to expect when they open your email. It's also important to space out your text so that it's easily scannable. Most readers won't read from top to bottom.
Email marketing is very competitive today. Marketers from all over the world are competing for your reader's "inbox attention." By carefully tracking, measuring and testing your email marketing, you can get the competitive edge that will skyrocket your business to success.