There are a lot of ways to promote your products and services online. You can employ social media marketing, search engine optimization, video marketing, and a host of other methods. Yet, marketers believe that email marketing remains unsurpassed in its effectiveness.
Why Does Email Marketing Matter?
Let’s take a look at a few reasons why email marketing is one of the most reliable methods of promoting your business online.
Consumers Check Their Emails Everyday
Most people check their email at least once a day, whether it’s their work or personal account. According to an article by Forbes, 78% of people check their emails throughout the day and approximately 61% of people open emails on their mobile phones. In other words, the fact that your customers check their emails so frequently means they will receive your messages far more than other forms of marketing.
Email Marketing Helps You Build Credibility
Consumers choose to do business with organizations that they like and trust. Emails give you the chance to build credibility by sharing useful, informative, and most importantly, valuable content with your readers. For instance, a monthly newsletter with a list of helpful and relevant content will allow your brand to establish itself as a thought leader in your industry.
Email Marketing Can Automate Your Sales Cycle
An email automation tool can help you create email drip campaigns. These automatically send emails to individuals on a schedule, allowing you to create touchpoints with your target customers. Email automation also will enable you to trigger specific messages when users take a particular action on your website. For example, if a visitor adds products to their cart and leaves without making a purchase, you can reach out to them and prompt them to complete the purchase. In a nutshell, email marketing automation is the gateway to automate your sales cycle.
People Still Prefer Emails
According to a report by OptinMonster, 60% of consumers sign up for brand emails expecting to receive promotional emails in their inbox, compared to the 20% who choose to follow brands on social media. Moreover, when it comes to making a purchase after receiving a marketing message, emails have the highest conversion rate (66%) compared to other types of marketing. In simple words, your target audience and leads are more likely to read and take action on your emails compared to any other form of marketing.
Email Marketing Is Easy To Track And Measure
Email marketing lets you look at exactly how many people open, read, and click through your email content. This information helps you determine if your campaign is successful and how much return on investment it’s offering. Alternatively, it also helps you to modify your strategy to track what kind of messaging brings the highest results.
Parameters To Consider While Designing A Successful Campaign
Now that you understand the benefits of email marketing, you might be thinking about implementing email campaigns to your marketing efforts. However, before you do that, it’s essential to understand the key metrics that you should keep track of when designing a successful campaign. Here are the parameters you must pay attention to:
Open Rate
This metric will give you an idea of your audience’s overall engagement.
How to calculate the open rate
The total number of emails opened, divided by the number of emails delivered is the open rate.
Click Rate
Similar to the open rate, click rate gives you an insight into your consumers’ engagement and who comes back to an email to re-engage.
How to calculate click rate:
The total number of clicks your emails get, divided by the total number of emails delivered, is considered to be the email click rate.
Hard Bounce Rate
Keeping track of this metric will allow you to gain an understanding of how much of your email list is inaccurate.
How to calculate the hard bounce rate:
The number of emails that weren’t delivered due to an invalid or nonexistent email address divided by the total number of emails sent is the hard bounce rate.
Unsubscribe Rate
This metric can help you recognize which campaigns aren’t working and can help you optimize your future campaigns.
How to calculate the unsubscription rate:
The number of people who unsubscribed from your mailing list, divided by the total number of emails delivered is the unsubscribe rate.
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While all email marketing metrics are essential, email unsubscribes are especially significant. As a brand, you will put in a lot of efforts to ensure that an email reaches someone’s inbox and is opened. The last thing you need is for people to unsubscribe from your email list altogether. Unlike other metrics, it’s essential that the unsubscribe rate remains low.
Why Do People Unsubscribe?
There are a lot of reasons one may choose to unsubscribe from an email list; however, most of the issues stem from the sender or the brand. Congested inboxes, stale content, and poor formatting are some of the top reasons why people choose to unsubscribe.
Seeing a few unsubscribers every so often is fine. According to OptinMonster, an unsubscribe rate below 0.5% is suitable for most email campaigns. A rate under 0.2% typically means you are within the norm, and a rate of over 0.5% indicates you need to make modifications to your strategy.
Sometimes, however, one campaign can lead to a sudden and massive spike in the number of unsubscribers. In such scenarios, it’s essential to understand why. Did you do something different compared to other campaigns? Did you change the send date? Was the content valuable or boring? Are your unsubscribers from an email list you bought or have they been long-time readers? These are some critical questions to ask and review when you see a rise in the number of unsubscribers.
More importantly, analyzing your unsubscribe rate can help you avoid previous mistakes when designing a new campaign.
How To Avoid A High Unsubscription Rate
Let’s take a look at how you can prevent a higher unsubscribe rate:
Segmentation Strategies For More Targeted Emails
One of the major reasons consumers unsubscribe is the fact that many brands send unappealing emails. Many organizations decide to send out generic emails, hoping to connect with every single consumer. However, all that does is make the emails so vague and unfocused; nobody finds them appealing.
Segmentation can help solve this problem. Segmentation means dividing your list into specific groups that can help you send targeted messages to each of them. Segmentation is also a great way to reduce the unsubscribe rate because you can send the right information to the right audience.
For example, if you are a skincare retailer, you can send different emails to men and women in your list. If you are an industrial manufacturer, you can target engineers with one email and buyers with another. Using a lead nurturing software can help you track a subscribers on-page and off-page activities. You can then use this data to identify if a particular subscriber is ready to buy or is still in the consideration stage. Finally, based on your conclusion, you can send messages to the appropriate audience.
According to the Lyris Annual Email Optimizer Report, segmented emails performed better compared to non targeted ones. Segmented emails result in 39% higher open rates, 28% lower unsubscribe rates, and 24% better revenue.
Stay Consistent With Your Email Frequency
Are you sending emails too frequently without any pattern? Are you sending multiple emails in one week and none for the next few weeks? Inconsistency is the primary reason why people unsubscribe. The key is to determine the right frequency for your brand and your audience.
If your audience knows what to expect from you, the likelihood of them unsubscribing is lower. However, you must remain consistent. In other words, if your subscribers are signing up for a monthly newsletter with your top articles, then you need to send them the monthly newsletter. If your subscribers are signing up of updates regarding promotions, you need to send them that information.
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Use A Mixture Of Single Optins And Double Optins
Single optins and double optins sounds more complicated than it is. A single optin means that a subscriber doesn’t need to confirm their subscription. Single optins are more straightforward for the user and the quickest way to increase your email list. However, they are also less respectful to your subscriber’s privacy and could easily lead to you becoming cluttered with bad data.
A double optin requires a subscriber to confirm their subscription, usually by clicking a link emailed to them right after they first decide to sign up. If you choose to employ double optins, it may take a little longer to build your email list. However, they offer you with a better quality audience and provides you with a chance to communicate with your audience via the confirmation email immediately.
Offer Discounts And Other Incentives
Consumers like discounts. If they know your emails can help them save money, then that is an incentive for them to open your emails. You could offer a discount, coupon code, or a free gift. You can even run a competition. An appealing offer will often lead your customers to make instant purchases and keep them as subscribers. However, you don’t want to overdo it with the offers. Too much of a good thing can ruin your brand value.
Consider A Variety Of Message Formats
If your audience knows exactly what they will find every time they open your email, they might skip it. However, if your emails contain a few surprises; then your audience will open it to see what they will receive this time. So try sending your emails in different formats. Try integrating graphics, memes, videos, infographics, and other forms of media into your email.
Provide Valuable Content
If you are continually recycling well-known information in your emails, people are going to stop reading and eventually unsubscribe. Therefore, to keep your subscribers from leaving, it’s imperative that you deliver high quality, valuable and unique content. You must ensure that your content is worth your reader’s time.
In business to consumer (B2C) marketing, valuable content can be in the form of helpful advice, how-to articles, infographics, etc. In a business to business (B2B) marketing model, valuable content can come in the form of insider insights that solve problems.
The bottom line is, you must provide information that will make people look forward to your emails.
Ensure Your Emails Don’t Load Slowly
Checking to see how your email loads on a computer and mobile device should be a customary piece of your email marketing routine because it plays a significant role in the success of your campaign. Don’t include graphics that are too heavy, graphic elements that don’t render on mobile, and anything else that makes reading your email an unpleasant experience.
Write Great Subject Lines
Your email message is ready; you have added valuable content and interesting media elements; it’s only a matter of time before you see your subscribers engaging with your email. However, the final results are disappointing, and you don’t know why. It could be because your subject line wasn’t exciting enough for your audience to open your email. Despite how much work you put into designing your email, it’s all for nothing if your subject line isn’t compelling enough.
Generally, the most successful email subject lines are between 3-5 words, 14-24 characters, 1-4 emojis, and written in title case. But the best advice is to write the subject line like a human would write one. Keep it short, make it personal, and say thank you.
Your email unsubscribe rate is a critical metric to consider for your email marketing. You must take the right steps to increase your subscribers and reduce your unsubscriber rates. However, your unsubscribe email list is never going to be empty. There will always be people on your list who will opt-out from receiving your emails.
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When they leave, it’s a good thing; they are probably not your target audience. In situations like these, it’s essential to shift your focus back to your subscribers and provide them with the best content that you can. As long as you provide your target audience with real and valuable content, your subscriber list will only grow.
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