What Do Your Email Open Rates & Click Rates Tell You?
You’re spending valuable time creating content for your emails. Each time your team sits down to craft some captivating content for your communications with prospects or customers, you are envisioning a certain outcome. Whether they are newsletters or sales emails, you want to be eliciting some sort of response or engagement. But are you seeing a return on the investment you’re making in your email marketing?
Let’s take a look at the numbers.
There are a number of stats you can look at to determine the effectiveness of your emails. Today, we’re going to discuss email open rate and click rate.
Email Open Rate
Your email open rate represents the percentage of opens to views. If 100 people viewed your email and 20 opened it, you’d have a 20% open rate. The open rate gives you a better understanding of how engaging your subject line. If you subject line is effective, you’ll see a higher open rate. In order to create emails people will actually read, you first must understand your audience. Your content will resonate much better with an audience you’ve clearly and appropriately defined. In addition to this, you must find a sweet spot for your audience’s frequency preferences. HubSpot’s research shows that for many businesses, this is between 16-30 emails per month.
Two tips to creating a subject line that gets opens:
- Keep it short. Your subject line should be no longer than 50 characters. This length not only allows the entire subject to be viewed, it is also proven to be more effective.
- Make it personal. Personalize the subject line with merge tags (or personalization tokens) like First and Last Name. Since people love seeing their own name, this tactic can catch their attention more effectively than a generic subject line. For example, “Karen, check out the latest news from our blog…”.
Email Click Rate
While email open rate can tell you a lot about how effective your subject line is, your email click rate can offer insight into how relevant your content is to your audience. Email click rate is the percentage of emails delivered that received at least one click. To maintain an effective click rate, you must understand what your audience’s pain points, challenges, goals and interests are. Research shows that businesses who segment their lists by various factors, can enjoy significant increases in transactions and revenue.
Three tips to creating content that gets clicks:
- Make link text specific and consise. Rather than using the ineffective ‘click here’ for your links, get specific about the information the viewer will see if they click through. Be sure to take them directly to the service, product or blog post you are referencing, rather than the home page of your website.
- Include more links. Your email campaigns should have a focused purpose and goal, but this doesn’t mean you can’t include multiple call-to-action links in various places throughout the email in order to receive more clicks. Test your links to uncover preferences and performance such as button vs hyperlinks.
While both of these statistics shed light on the overall performance of your campaign, it is equally important to pay attention to statistics that show the end results of your email campaigns, such as click-to-conversion rates, or the number clicks that resulted in a purchase or transaction. This type of closed loop reporting will tell you where you are being most effective in generating customers and revenue with your email marketing efforts.
The overall effectiveness of your campaigns from open, clicks and conversions depends heavily on your ability to send valuable and targeted content to the most interested audience. Establishing your strategy and setting your goals upfront will significantly improve your ability to run successful email marketing campaigns.
