and the second article about How to Create Effective Email Marketing Campaigns
Then you can also check Email Composition and Structure
By now you have a list of subscribers, an email campaign plan, and a copy of your email. You've also sent your email through MailChimp. But now that the email has been sent, how will you determine whether your emails successfully arrive in the recipient's inbox, get opened, resulting in increased sales for your business, or fail altogether? And how can you send different types of emails to different people based on their preferences?
In this lesson, you'll learn how to analyze the results of your email campaign. You'll also explore how you can use A/B testing and segmentation to improve your content and better target specific subscribers. You just sent an email to your subscribers.
How can you tell whether your campaign was successful?
When you send an e-mail to your subscriber list, you hope that each recipient will perform a series of actions.
First, the subscriber has to receive the e-mail. Then, he has to open it and then click the call to action or CTA. Finally, you likely want the subscriber to perform some action on your website, like making a purchase, completing a survey, registering for an event, or something else. Each stage in this process can be tracked.
You can look at the bounce rate to determine whether your emails were delivered successfully.
You can look at the open rate to determine the percentage of recipients who opened your email.
The click rate provides information about how many people clicked the various links within your email.
Finally, the conversion rate describes how many people performed a specific action on your website,
after clicking on your email.
First, you'll need to look at whether your emails were delivered successfully.
Emails that can't be delivered are said to have bounced. There are two types of bounces; Hard Bounces and Soft Bounces.
A hard bounce occurs when the email address is not valid or it doesn't exist. There is no way that you will ever be able to successfully send emails to that address.
A soft bounce occurs when the mailbox is temporarily unavailable.
Maybe the mailbox is full, the message was too large or the server was down.
The email address is valid, but the mailbox can't receive your message right now. It's important to remove addresses associated with hard bounces from your email list since sending large amounts of emails to invalid email addresses can flag you as a spammer.
Most email service providers, like MailChimp, do this automatically.
Your email provider will also generally try to resend emails that soft bounce for a while. Addresses that cause soft bounces don't necessarily have to be removed. The email addresses are still valid.
When analyzing your email campaign success, you should check your Bounce Rate.
Try to keep your soft and hard bounce rates low, around 1% or less.
One last thing, just because your email didn't bounce doesn't mean that it was successfully delivered to the recipient. Your email can fail to make it through to your recipient's inbox due to a spam filter or firewall. While bounce statistics are fairly easy to track, it is difficult to capture data on emails that have been filtered out through one of these methods.
What else should you monitor besides bounce rate?
Email marketers hope that their subscribers will perform a series of actions. Open the email, click the call to action, do something like make a purchase like a Facebook page, complete a survey, etc.
We can record this data for each subscriber and calculate the open rate for the campaign, the click rate, the conversion rate, at what rate do customers actually perform the action requested of them.
All of these metrics are usually calculated as a proportion of the total number of emails successfully delivered.
The unique open rate is the number of recipients who opened the email at least once, divided by the total number of messages successfully delivered.
A low open rate tells you that your subject line is not capturing the attention it needs.
A word of caution with the open rate; Emails are only counted as open if the recipient also receives the images embedded in that message.
This means the open rate metric works for HTML emails, but not plain text emails.
Open rates can also be affected by spam filters and if people forward the email.
The click rate or click-through rate is the number of recipients who clicked at least once, divided by the total number of messages successfully delivered.
A low click-to-open rate tells you that your email is not effective at driving click-throughs.
Some emails aren't designed to drive clicks, but if a click-through is your objective with the email, then a low click-to-open rate means you're not offering enough value or your call to action isn't clear.
Many emails have multiple links beside the call to action. Using a click map, you can see exactly where
your customers are clicking within the emails that you send.
For instance, your subscribers may be clicking
on social links or other links to your Website.
A word of caution with click rate; as you saw in the clip map, an email can receive many clicks.
You'll want to be sure what click rate you're exploring when analyzing the results of your email campaigns. Are these total clicks or unique clicks?
Unique clicks count only one click per recipient and discard the additional clicks generated if that recipient clicks the call to action multiple times.
The open rate and the click rate are automatically calculated by most email service providers.
The conversion rate is typically the number of recipients who go on to take any action, divided by the number of emails successfully delivered.
The click rate may be calculated differently by different email service providers (ESPs). Most ESPs provide both unique and total rates in their reports. The number of subscribers who took the action at least once is included in the unique rate. A total rate takes into account the total number of actions. In most cases, you'll want to concentrate on one-of-a-kind rates. Furthermore, most ESPs do not factor in emails that were not delivered (bounces) in their calculations.
common definitions:
Click rate
Percentage of total recipients who clicked any tracked link in the campaign.
Clicked
The number of recipients who clicked any tracked link. You can click this number in your report to open a list of subscribers who clicked.
Total clicks
The total number of times any tracked link was clicked. This count includes multiple clicks from individual recipients.
Now, consider the following email campaign. 10,500 emails sent 500 bounced 500 opened Of the 500 emails that were opened: 200 unique recipients clicked at least 1 link within the email 100 unique recipients clicked the call-to-action 250 total clicks were recorded (some recipients clicked the same link multiple times, and some clicked multiple links within the email) 105 clicks on the call-to-action were recorded (some recipients clicked the CTA multiple times)
You could calculate the click rate as:
# total clicks / # delivered emails 250/10,000 = 2.5%
# unique clicks / # delivered emails 200/10,000 = 2%
# total clicks / # opened emails 250/500 = 50%
# unique clicks/ # opened emails 200/500 = 40%
For the same email, that's a huge range of possible click rates. Similar calculations could be done on clicks that were specifically on the call-to-action.
Make sure you understand how your ESP comes up with these figures. Here's how MailChimp figures out the click-through rates. For the rest of the lesson, we'll use this method of calculation.
The conversion rate is typically the number of recipients who go on to take an action divided by the number of emails successfully delivered.
Conversion rates can be harder to measure since this involves tracking user behavior from your email to your website and within pages on your website. Think of how many different web pages you have to click through when you make a purchase.
One way to track conversions is through Google Analytics or through an e-commerce integration with your email service provider or ESP.
To use Google Analytics to track your email campaigns, you will have to put Google Analytics tags within your emails and also include a snippet of code on relevant web pages.
For example, all of the pages related to the checkout flow.
This allows Google Analytics to aggregate this information and track the percentages of users who complete the full path from email to purchase. You can also track different points in the process.
For example, what if customers click through your email, add items to a cart, but then abandon the checkout process?
If this is a significant problem, you may want to consider changing the checkout flow. You can also craft emails to target customers at specific points in the checkout process.
For instance, you can send timely reminders to customers about unpurchased items to prompt them to return to the site to complete checkout.
There are a few more metrics to keep an eye on.
The Positive
Customers are so enthusiastic about your emails that they are forwarding them to their friends!
The Social Aspects (Facebook likes, tweets, etc.)
The Bad
The Unsubscribe Rate Is Bad. This must be kept to a bare minimum. 1 percent, for example. Consider reducing the frequency of your emails or analyzing how you can make your content more relevant and engaging to your customers if your unsubscribe rate is too high. You must provide a way for people to unsubscribe, or you'll end up in the next bucket.
The Ugly
The rate of Ugly Abuse and Complaints. Customers can mark emails as spam with most mailbox providers. While subscribers may mistakenly mark your emails as spam, if a large number of customers are complaining about your emails, you must change course right away. A high rate of abuse not only creates enemies for your brand and business, but it can also lead to you being labeled as a spammer. Under no circumstances should this number rise too high.
What can you do to change that?
You can conduct an AB test to test out versions of your email, to understand which version performs best. You can also segment your list to send targeted messages to your subscribers so they only receive relevant emails from you.
An AB test of an email is the test of various elements of an email, the subject line, pre-header, e-mail content, e-mail images, or even call to action, where the A version is the original and the B version has only one change from the original.
You can use an AB test to determine which email performs best. In an AB test you will send out your version A email to one half of your email subscriber list and your version B email to the other half or you can select a subgroup to test against.
For example, if you have 30,000 subscribers you could select 3,000 of those subscribers to be the audience for your AB test where half of the 3,000 get The version A email and the other half get the version B email.
In each case, the group that receives either email should be random. Also whether you use your whole list or a subgroup, each group should be sufficiently large.
You want to make sure your results are statistically significant.
In the Next Lesson, you will learn how to make A/B tests to Optimize your email marketing efforts and increase the conversion rate
Next Lesson, Email Marketing A/B Testing
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