You’re probably familiar with the terms “open” and “click” rate when it comes to online marketing. Open rate is the percentage of people who have opened your marketing email. A higher open rate means your email is interesting and well-crafted, and encourages recipients to take action.
However, there is another important metric to measure when it comes to email marketing: email sent rate. The email sent rate gives you an idea of whether your email marketing campaign is performing as you expected it to or not. When you send an email and fail to receive a response, it usually means one of two things:
1. The email address you used was invalid. Make sure you’re sending the email to an active email address. You can use a tool like Return Path to easily find the email address for a given domain. If you’re not sure if an email address is valid or not, you can also use Reverse Email Lookup to find out. You might want to contact the owner of the email address to make sure it’s still active.
2. You sent the email to the wrong person. It’s essential that your email address is correct and that you’re sending it to the right person. Sometimes we accidentally email the same person multiple times. To avoid sending duplicate emails, you can use a tool like FullContact, which provides detailed email contact information for millions of individuals.
Why is the Email Sent Rate Important?
You might be wondering why the email sent rate is important, rather than the open rate. Let’s take a look:
If you have a high open rate but a low email sent rate, it usually means that your email is not performing well. The opposite is usually the case when you have a low open rate but a high email sent rate. In this case, the email indicates that your marketing message was not only interesting, but also reached the right audience.
How to Improve Your Email’s Performance
As we’ve established, the open rate and the email sent rate are two important indicators of the success of an email marketing campaign. Let’s take a quick look at how you can improve your email’s performance in order to have a higher open rate and an increased chance of delivering the message to the right audience:
1. Keep it short. People are less likely to open an email that’s longer than a few paragraphs. Keep your emails short and to the point. Avoid unnecessary fluff. Your email subscribers probably have other things to do than to read your marketing message, so make sure you keep the content interesting.
2. Use graphics. People like receiving emails that include drawings or photos more than they like receiving plain text-based messages. Even if you don’t use graphics in your emails, you should consider using them in your blog posts or other content. If you’re writing a novel, using graphics to break up the text can help make it more interesting to read.
3. Measure the right metrics. The open rate and the email sent rate for a given email marketing campaign will vary from one email to another. You can use online tools to analyze and track the metrics for your entire campaign. When you set up your analytics account, you will be able to choose the metrics you want to track. Don’t worry about getting everything right at the beginning; instead, use this opportunity to refine your measurements as you go.
4. Consider using a CRM. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a type of software that helps businesses manage their interactions with customers. When you use a CRM, you will be able to keep track of all your interactions with each customer, including email communications. Consider using a CRM to organize and streamline your email marketing campaigns. It will help you stay organized and on top of your game, as well as allow you to send more effective emails that bring in the most revenue.
How can a business owner or marketer use these analytics tools to analyze marketing success? Let’s take a quick look:
1. Identify the open rate. This is the first step in figuring out what’s going on with your email campaign. Simply enter your email address in the relevant field, and click on the “Get stats” button. You will then see a screen similar to the one below:
2. Identify the click-through rate. Once you know the open rate for your email, you can calculate the click-through rate. The click-through rate is the percentage of people who click on a link or button in your email. To see how it works, go back to Step 1 and enter your email address again. This time, click on the “Visit web site” button. You will then be taken to a different part of the tool, as shown below:
3. Identify the conversion rate. Once you have a good feeling for the metrics for your email campaign, you can start to optimize it. The conversion rate is the percentage of people who take a specific action after viewing your email. In our example above, clicking on the “Visit web site” button leads to the conversion rate. The button itself probably doesn’t need to be specified; you can leave it blank and it will be assumed that the visitor converted because they wanted to visit the website shown.
E-Commerce Marketing vs. Online Marketing
Another important distinction to make is between e-commerce marketing and online marketing. E-commerce is the process of selling things online — typically using email marketing as the vehicle. When someone buys a product or service online, the transaction can be traced back to the email address used. So it is a type of marketing that you can track and analyze using analytics tools.
However, online marketing can also be used to promote products and services that are not directly related to buying online. One of the distinguishing factors is that the target audience has not necessarily bought the product or service before. The product or service may be used in a different way, or be part of a different transaction than what the marketer initially wanted to promote.
Consider emailing your subscribers about a sale of a product or service that they might be interested in. Or, consider using online marketing to promote a book, movie, or musical artist that you believe they might like. The key is to find the right audience for the product or service that you are promoting, and use the right channel (i.e., email) to get the message across.