When it comes to email marketing, no two approaches are the same. While it’s always important to establish a connection with your audience and provide them with valuable content, you also need to ensure that each email you send scores well with both receivers and the search engines. In this article we’ll discuss the open rates you can expect to see for various email marketing campaigns and how you can use this data to fine-tune your strategy.
The Basics Of Open Rates
Before we dig in, it’s important to establish the difference in meaning between open rate and click rate. Open rate, as the name would suggest, is the percentage of email messages that are opened by recipients. Conversely, click rate is the percentage of email messages that are actually clicked on by the recipient. In other words, a 10% open rate means that for every 100 emails you send, only 10 will be opened by the recipient. In this case, the spam score is 10%.
Whether you’re sending out marketing emails or sales emails, open rate is always a good indicator of the success of your campaign. If you want to find out how many people are actually clicking on the offers you’re sending out, then click rate is the figure you’re after. For example, if you send out an email with an offer to promote an event and you only get a 0.2% click rate, then you know that the email is not performing well. It would be better to focus on other metrics, such as unsubscribes and spam scores, to get an idea of how effective your campaign is.
The Effect Of Subject Line
Your subject line is one of the first things a potential recipient will see when they open your email. To ensure that it draws the attention of your audience, you must carefully consider its structure and format. The same thing goes for the text inside the email body. When it comes to subject lines, shorter is generally better. When searching online, users are significantly more likely to click on an email if its subject line features words that are part of their search query. On the other hand, longer subject lines generally perform better when it comes to getting a response. This makes sense when you consider the fact that you have more space to work with and you can use all the tools at your disposal, like bold, italics, and underlining, to draw the attention of your readers.
When it comes to email marketing, subject lines should always be kept short and sweet. Try for one or two words only that are keywords or phrases that represent the content of the email. For example, if you’re sending a promotional email about a new product you just introduced, you could use the following phrase as your subject line:
- The Essential Phone
- Shopbop’s New Summer Styles
- Trendy Sneakers For the Summer
- Victoria Beckham Mini Victoria Beckham Sunglasses
- Men’s Plaid Shirt
You could also use variations of this theme for the rest of the email. Having a few key phrases in your subject line will help users find your content quickly and easily. If you’re having trouble coming up with a catchy subject line, it’s a good idea to ask your audience what they think about your email topic. Chances are, they’ll have an opinion on the matter and it’s likely that their insight will help you come up with a phrase or sentence that perfectly suits your email’s content.
What About The Body Of The Email?
The body of an email, as the name would suggest, is the portion of the email that contains the actual content. This content can take the form of a lengthy article or a list of products or services that the company offers. When it comes to crafting the body of an email, you want to make sure that each word, sentence, and paragraph is carefully considered and that your message is easily digestible. In other words, you want to ensure that your readers go away feeling happy, excited, or motivated to take action after reading your email.
A content-rich body leads to more opens and clicks. In general, people are more receptive to what’s inside an email if its body contains a lot of words. According to HubSpot Blogs research, users are 60% more likely to open an email if its body contains more than three paragraphs of content. That’s pretty significant.
To get the most out of your content, make sure to provide the reader with the most vital information first. Since most emails are opened on mobile devices, make sure to design your email’s body to look like a well-designed mobile app. Doing this will help make your email more engaging and help it stand out among the sea of similar emails users receive every day.
The Art Of The Mail Merge
Mail merges are extremely useful when you want to quickly and efficiently send out a large volume of emails without having to type out each one individually. This is particularly convenient when you’re dealing with sensitive information, like credit card numbers or other forms of payment. Since these types of emails are often considered spam, it’s a good idea to use a tool like Mandrill to help you build and send out your email campaign quickly and affordably.
With the exception of the subject line and the first line of the email, which is always To: Joe User, all the content inside the email can be automatically generated using a mail merge.
Let’s say you have a list of 500 contacts, all of whom signed up for your email list. To save you time and effort, Mandrill will take care of the heavy lifting for you. All you have to do is review the list of contacts and decide which ones you want to send the email to and then simply tell Mandrill how you want the content to appear inside the email.
An email merge will make your life a lot easier. You’ll no longer have to worry about forgetting to include the correct email addresses or sending the email to the wrong person. With a mail merge, the email will be automatically generated based on the data in your contacts.
As you can see from the example above, a mail merge combines data from a list of contacts with information on a product that was used as the trigger for the send. In this example, the list data includes the first and last names, phone number, postal code, and email address of the contacts. The product data includes the name of the product, the price, and a short description. The result is an email that looks like it was sent from one person and has all the hallmarks of a well-designed, quality email.
Spam Scores And The Effect Of Unsubscribes
Like most email marketing platforms, HubSpot also provides you with a spam score for each of your emails. The spam score ranges from 0 to 500 and represents the confidence you can have in predicting whether or not that email will be categorized as spam. The higher the number, the more confident you can be in assuming that your email will not be marked as spam by the recipient’s spam filter.
If you’re new to email marketing, it’s a good idea to start with low-quality, untargeted emails and gradually work your way up to more refined campaigns. This way, you’ll be able to establish a good reputation with your future customers.
More Information On Open Rates
If you’d like, you can find lots more in-depth information on open rates and how to achieve high open rates in your emails, you can check out the Knowledge base article here.