Test, Measure, Optimize, Repeat. This should be your mantra when email marketing. Measuring your results is more important than the results you actually get. With accurate statistics about your email marketing campaigns, you are armed to successfully improve your campaigns. And improvement is the name of the game. Let’s look at what type of things you can track and what each statistic means for your campaigns.

Before we begin, you must be familiar with the idea of A/B testing. It is also known as split-testing. The concept is that you have two variations of your emails being sent out at the same time to the same list of contacts. This means that for a particular message, you have two versions of your subject and two versions of your email body. Half of your contacts will get the first variation and the other half will get the second variation. This allows you to directly compare different subject lines and different message text. Then once you have the data for each variation, you can decide what works best and change the worse one to try to beat your best one. Once you beat it, you start changing the old winner until it beats your new winner, and so on. This is an easy way to always be improving your messages without guessing or sacrificing results during your test.

Statistics to measure and what they mean:

Deliverability

What is it: The percentage of emails that are not rejected by the recipient’s email server.

What is a normal deliverability rate: If you have a double opt-in email list, you should be able to achieve near 100% deliverability.

What it means: If you are experiencing low deliverability rates, this could mean two things; the quality of your email addresses is low or your email service is having problems sending your emails. The quality of your email addresses depends largely on how you collect them. If you require double opt-in approval for your list, then you should have very high quality and very high deliverability. If you purchase your lists or do not require double opt-in, you are opening yourself up to fake, old, or incorrect email addresses and your deliverability will suffer. Some reasons for your email service to be having problems include their servers being reported as frequent senders of spam and poor server management. If you suspect the cause of your low deliverability is your email service, you should switch immediately. They are causing your valuable connections to be missed before the recipient even sees the email!

Sending Day and Time

What is it: The time of day and the day of the week that your emails are sent out.

What is the best time and day to send: It depends on the demographics of your list.

What it means: If you send emails every day of the week at the same time of day, you will quickly see a pattern in your statistics. Some days will always be your best days, like Mondays, and some days will routinely give poor results, like Fridays. Time of day also plays a huge part in the success of your email campaigns. Friday afternoons are notoriously bad for getting responses from people who work in offices, as anyone who has worked in one knows… everyone wants to get out of there! Sending your emails late at night usually isn’t the best time, because it is common practice for people to quickly go through their email they received over the night assuming it is automated or spam. For people who are working it is usually best to have your emails arrive right around the middle of the day before or after lunch. Your mileage may vary depending on your list, so analyze the time of day and day to determine what time is the best. And only send during that time.

Open Rate

What is it: The percentage of people who open your message.

What is a normal open rate: Varies on the quality and targeting of your list. Industry average is around 2-5%, while some very targeted campaigns can reach 40% or more!

What it means: The open rate is directly affected by the quality of your subject and the “from” address. These two things are the only things a recipient can see before they open the email. This is where split-testing (A/B testing) comes in handy. Write an email with two different subjects and compare their open rates. You should be able to see a statistically significant difference after a couple hundred emails go out. Throw away the subject with the worst performance and create a new subject in an attempt to beat the score of your other subject. Also users are more likely to open your emails if it is from an email address or person they trust. You might be an authority on a topic that they are interested about or you have contacted them before so they know who you are. Usually open rates improve simply by keeping in contact with your list.

Click Through Rate (CTR)

What is it: The percentage of recipients who opened your email that clicked on a link in your email.

what is a normal CTR: Varies depending on the message content.

What it means: Your message text might be geared towards calling the recipient to click on your link to your page or it might not. I assume for the sake of this article that you are interested in having your contacts click on your links. To determine the best place to put your links, you will have to use split-testing again. Set up two different variations of your message and place links in each. Where you place the link, the link text, and the surrounding content all affect the CTR of your message. Links above the fold (visible without users having to scroll their screen) are more likely to be clicked than those lower on the page.  Links that have compelling content with a call to action to click on the link are more effective as well. The anchor text of your links has a large affect as well. Links that simply say “click here” will likely not perform as well as links that offer more information like, “view our latest blog post about gardening.” You will have to test different strategies to determine which is best for your audience.

Conversion Rate

What is it: The percentage of people who clicked through to your site who end up registering on your site, making a purchase, or other desired goal.

What is a normal conversion rate: Depends on how well you have targeted your list as well as what goal you are hoping they reach.

What it means: Your conversion rate has just as much to do with your landing page and  your website as it does with your emails that get them there in the first place. If your emails are works of art and drive thousands of users to your site but your site doesn’t fulfill the promise of your emails, your conversion rate will suffer. To solve this problem, use the same strategy you have been using in your email campaigns. Keep your landing pages consistent and deliver on the expectations of your users. Optimizing landing pages and websites is way outside the scope of this post, but the same mantra will help you here, too.

Never Settle for What You Have

There is always room for improvement. As long as you keep a close eye on your results, you will always have a clear indication of can be improved. And once you successfully improve it, guess what? Now you have another bar to raise.

Test, Measure, Optimize, Repeat

As long as you follow this one tip, you will never make a mistake that will cost you your business.

Focus on the Lead’s Experience

Make it obvious that you are there for them. It is good to know that you are the best in the business and that you offer spectacular value, but if the customer does not feel you are out for their best interest, they will not care about the other things. Think about companies that you hate dealing with. You probably have thoughts like, “They take forever to return my calls,” “They just try to sell me their most expensive product regardless of my needs,” or, “Their product doesn’t do what they told me it would do.” The reasons for disliking a company aren’t usually based around a negative experience with the service or product, but based around the response you get when you encounter a problem with them. Think about the companies you love. You might have thoughts like, “They offer free shipping on returns,” “I can go into their store and they will help me set up the product,” or, “I am not rushed in my decision to purchase.” The reasons are usually not because their products work all the time every time. When you have a problem with a company you love, they assist in sorting it out. They are there for you. That’s what you have to do for your customers.

Make sure you always do the little things. Send them an email on their birthday. Call them back when you say you will. Find out their needs before you offer a solution. Use your imagination. It is usually the creative small things that stick out in a customer’s mind and that they tell their friends about.

What are some of the small things you do that you think made a big impact on your customers? Share some in the comments!

In my last post I discussed some good goals for your email marketing campaigns. I promised another tip for nurturing the relationships with your subscribers, so let’s jump right in. I said it was important to learn how frequently you should contact your subscribers. But just what do you talk about with them from the very first encounters all the way up to when they have a lot of knowledge about your company and what you do?

Be Honest and Give Them Useful Information

When you first make contact with them, you should treat it just as if you are meeting a new person for the first time. You wouldn’t jump into a conversation with someone you barely know and ask them to go on a Carribean cruise with you. So don’t try to sell them tickets for a cruise or whatever product your business sells. A good idea might be to tell them some good things about Carribean cruises in general. You might link them to some news stories about a related topic. Anything that sparks their interest and gets them thinking. If they sense any effort to sell something, there is a good chance they will be turned off or ignore your email. Explain who you are, what you are involved with, and, most importantly, give them some helpful and honest information.

Once you think your relationship has blossomed beyond the ‘getting to know you’ stage, you can start discussing your products and services. The subscriber will be familiar with your company and it is likely that they will actually want to learn about what you offer. After all, they haven’t unsubscribed, which means they are beginning to trust you! You are becoming their ‘go-to guy’ for your particular service.

How do you know when you should start mentioning products and special offers? You test different campaigns, of course! Set up two different campaigns. In one, don’t mention any products or offers until you have given them some information about what you will eventually offer them. In the other campaign, start mentioning prices and products within the first or second email. You should be able to compare unsubscribe rates, open rates, and conversion rates and determine when the appropriate time is to approach them with a sales effort. Every business’ market is different and you need to learn as much as you can about yours.

Have you made any discoveries about the best steps for approaching a new lead for your business? Share them in the comments!

We’ve all been in a high pressure sales situation as a buyer. And, if you are like me, the only thing you wanted to do was run away!

The most effective salesmen create a relationship with the buyer and give him or her the information necessary to make a smart decision. Salesmen who help in this way usually have buyers pressuring them to sell them the car. Instead of running away, the buyer might say, “I’ve done my research and this is the car for me! I’m ready to buy.”

The same basic rules of selling apply to email marketing as well. The goal of email marketing isn’t to make a sale. It is to build a relationship with your potential customer. A large portion of your sales will not happen right after you send out your email campaigns. They will happen months or years later when a subscriber finally has a need for your product or service. If you have cultivated the relationship properly, that subscriber will immediately think of you and make a purchase.

Obviously, email marketing is much less personal than face-to-face communication. But it doesn’t have to be cold and impersonal. Here is one tip for building a relationship with your subscriber:

Keep in Touch

There is a delicate balance when it comes to the frequency of your messages. If you send too frequently, you risk overloading the subscriber with too much information. If you wait too long between each of your messages, you risk being forgotten. Both situations cause the subscriber to treat you as spam and that’s good for nobody. This balance depends on who is on your list and what you are sending. The best way to tell what works the best is to test different strategies. Set up a weekly campaign and test it against a monthly campaign. I recently tested a weekly campaign that sent a message once a week for eight weeks. 55% of the conversions came after week five. Those subscribers probably wouldn’t have converted had I not kept in touch beyond the first month.

Stay tuned for some more tips on nuturing a relationship with your subscribers. Do you have any clever ideas for keeping in touch with your subscriber list? Let me know in the comments.