Thursday 28 April 2016

How to Test Effectiveness of Your Email Marketing Campaigns


Without having the ability to test and analyze your emailmarketing campaigns, you cannot expect much improvement in terms of conversions and return on investment. Testing the effectiveness of your marketing plan is one of the most important reasons why you should be using a reputed email marketing service provider that is equipped with the latest reporting tools. So first thing in analyzing your campaign is to ensure your service provider is able to give you reports with some key metrics on it.



1) Open Rate: This is always the first aspect that you need to check. Open rate means the number of people that actually opened your email. You should not confuse this with the number of people that received the email in their inbox. Open rate is specifically those that read your subject line and opened the email to read it. Typically email service providers insert hidden pixels inside emails when they are sent out to check how many emails got opened by the list subscribers. If you have an unusually low open rate, then it could mean your subject is simply not catchy enough to get people’s attention. With hundreds of marketing emails received each week, if your subject itself is poor then most people will choose to delete the email. In some cases, if open rates are extremely low, then it could also mean you have purchased the list and not actually taken time to create a double opt-in list on your own. Hence open rates are the first thing you need to see and if this is low, then the quality of everything else does not matter. Open rate is denoted in percentage form. Hence an average open rate would be something like 20% meaning out of every 100 subscribers, 20 people actually opened your email.

2) Click Rate: Once you know that your open rate is fine, the next thing you need to check is click rate. Click rate is the number of people that read your email and then click on a link in the email content. This is assuming you have sent a promotional email where you want subscribers to click on a link and take some action on the webpage that opens up. Click rates are also denoted in percentage form. If your click rate is poor, then you need to pay attention on your content. As long as your list is highly targeted double opt-in list, it should get industry average open rates. From there, if people are simply reading your email and not taking any action, it means your content is poor. Take some time to understand what would convince the reader to at least click on the link provided to view the landing page and write content accordingly.

3) Landing Page Conversions: To analyze landing page conversions, you will need to insert some tracking code of analytics services in your promotional web pages. If you have good open rates and click rates yet do not have any conversions, it could mean your landing page content is not grabbing any attention. If click through rates are fine and as per industry average, then you should ensure your landing page with the offer has content that will lead to the final sale or sign up to your offer. Typically your email content, landing pages, follow up emails together would be part of your sales funnel that leads to conversions.

As you grow your list and send out emails, testing effectiveness of your campaign using the above metrics becomes essential for better results. You would need to carry out A/B split testing as well to check what content gets more open and click through rates. We will cover A/B split testing in another article shortly. However, till then please check the reports provided by your email service provider to understand which aspect of your campaign needs more help.


Article From: shonamail.com

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