No joke, this is what my wife's inbox looks like.

I’ve sent out a few newsletters in my time at Search Influence, and I’ve had to curb the client’s expectations more than once. Email marketing can be a time-consuming, arduous process and returns what seems to be very little. While email marketing is becoming more obsolete in this social media-dominated world, it’s still worth pursuing. Your expectations just need to be adjusted (read: lowered). Below I’ll break down the different metrics, what they mean, if you should care about them and what you should be expecting out of a successful campaign.

Open Rate
The Open Rate is exactly what it sounds like… well, sorta. It measures how many recipients opened the newsletter, but beware. These numbers are usually vastly underreported. For instance, if the recipient’s email blocks images, it will not count as an open unless they click to display them. Many people (including myself before learning this information) choose not to display these images, so I wouldn’t put much stock in this metric.

If you do, however, here is what you should expect. I’ll use an industry familiar to me – Beauty and Personal Care. I had a client express disappointment with the performance of a particular Mother’s Day campaign. It went out to roughly 1,500 recipients and had an Open Rate of 19%, which looks pretty terrible on the surface; however, MailChimp reports that the average Open Rate for this industry is 14.94%. It might not be something to write home about, but after delivering this information to the client they were much more impressed with their campaign.

Click Rate
Good thing these names pretty much define themselves. Saves me some time. The Click Rate (click-thru rate or CTR) is how many people click a link from your campaign. This metric is going to be drastically lower than your Open Rate. It’s possible to get into a double-digit percentage here, but not likely. In fact, The Click Rate average for most industries is less than 5%.

Bounce Rate
In email marketing, the Bounce Rate is determined by the number of email addresses that failed to receive the message sent. There are two types of Bounce Rate: hard and soft. A hard bounce occurs when the recipient email address does not exist or is unrecognized. This is generally anywhere from 1% – 5% for most industries. It’s important to purge the incorrect addresses when this occurs, as it can bring down your sender reputation.

A soft bounce is when the message is sent back from a valid email due to an issue with the server, such as an inbox that has reached capacity. There’s not much you can do about these, but the average is typically less than 3% so it doesn’t have a negative impact.

Abuse Complaint Rate
One of my biggest pet peeves is also one of the most ridiculous. I cannot stand it when someone abuses the “Abuse Complaint” function in eblasts. Its intended purpose is to mark spam or emails to which you may not have subscribed. If you use an eblast client like MailChimp, it will automatically remove these emails from your list. If you’re sending out your own, you could be blocked from the ISP if too many complaints are received, so constant vigilance is needed.  The industry averages are mostly below 0.01% for this, so if yours is higher than that I don’t know what to tell you. Delete all emails in your list? Wipe your harddrive? Burn your computer? I don’t know, I’m just spit-balling here. This feature is not intended to be used as a quick way to stop receiving annoying emails because you hastily forgot to uncheck the “send me news and specials” box of a form. That’s what the next section is for!

(Sorry, I know I can get unnecessarily worked up over something so trivial. My therapist and I are working on it. For the time being I’ll shift my hatred to those who are more deserving of it, like people who leave shopping carts in parking spaces or in the middle of the lot because they’re too lazy to walk the 30 feet to the cart corral.

People who leave shopping carts in parking spaces. People who leave shopping carts in parking spaces. People who leave shopping carts in parking spaces)

Unsubscribe Rate
…is, again, exactly what it sounds like. It’s the rate of people that unsubscribe from your newsletter. This is what most people intend to do when reporting you as spam, but are too lazy to find out the proper way to do so and end up doing unwarranted damage to your campaign stats.

I’m just going to stop here before a tirade ensues.

People who leave trash in movie theaters. People who leave trash in movie theaters. People who leave trash in movie theaters…

These are the basic factors that you’ll be looking at when running an email marketing campaign — remember, while your success can be tracked with some measure of accuracy, it’s all relative. Next time you send out a newsletter or special email offer to your subscribers, take a look at your metrics. You might be pleasantly surprised!

1. Consistent and timely messages. Plan, Plan, Plan! Decide ahead of time when you’re going to be communicating with your audience. In terms of email marketing, how frequently will you message? Monthly, Bi-Monthly, or Quarterly? Tuesdays or Thursdays? While your plan doesn’t have to be as detailed as blueprints, you should still decide when you are going to send and what you’re going to talk about. There are articles and case studies with varying results on when the best times of day to deliver are. Always keep your target demographic in mind. When are they going to have the time to read? I can promise you I won’t be reading any non-personal email after noon on Friday. Who cares at that point in time? Let me at the weekend. If you’re helping me decide what do to with my weekend maybe you should get me that during my mid week hump when I’m impatiently waiting for the weekend to roll around. If you’re tweeting or posting an update don’t overdue it and post daily until the day of the sale, event or whatever you’re pimping. You still need to be timely in your delivery. Again, when is your audience going to listen, care and be able to respond? Of course, don’t forget in social forums it’s not just about you, you must interact – it’s not about one way communication.

2. Only send something you would read yourself. Don’t send something just to send something. Often, companies find that the months slip by without sending out a message and then rush to put something together at the last minute when they need it. Tactic #1 will help you be prepared and avoid these last minute throw-togethers that could get multiple users unsubscribing from your list if they feel you’ve wasted their time. When it comes to social forums sometimes you can send something to send something but make sure you would read it. If it’s not  interesting, insightful, entertaining to your target demographic don’t do it. Of course be sure it matches your overall marketing message and brand identity.

3. Define your Goal. What is the point of the message? Do you want readers to call in and book appointments? Do you want them to fill out a form requesting more information? Do you want them to purchase an item from your site?  Are you being re-tweeted? Gaining fans or growing your network? Once you define what it is you consider a “conversion,” figure out how you will measure this goal, and move on to step 4.

4. Track. Track everything, and watch the numbers, read into them, and learn from them. If you see a significant portion unsubscribing from your list, or a decline in conversions, or fewer click throughs on your links perhaps conduct some testing to see if the decline was a result of the message itself or of the timing.

Tracking and measuring are almost as important as the timing and message itself, and the former should certainly influence the latter. The best part about planning ahead is that you will have a greater chance of learning from your mistakes and you’ll have time to adjust future messages to be more relevant and effective.

In my current position at Search Influence, I do not work with email marketing on a daily basis.  However, in my previous job, I did.  I worked with both consumer emails and eNewsletters within organizations.  My intention here is not to call-out the small business who sent this email – but, to hopefully allow other small businesses to learn from their mistakes with some very basic email marketing tips.
For starters, I will show you a screen shot of the email that I received.  At first glance, how many things can you find wrong with it?

This is just to give you a visual.  There are some things that you cannot tell just by looking at this screen shot.

At first glance, here are some things that I noticed that you should NOT do when sending an email to your customers:

1. The very first thing you might notice is that the entire email is written in ALL CAPS and has a million exclamation points!!!!!!!!  This actually lessens the impact of your message and may appear that you are SHOUTING AT YOUR CUSTOMER!!!  It can also land your email in your customer’s spam folder.

2. There are some obvious grammatical errors here.  One in particular is the misspelling of what is supposed to read “your” in the last line.  It is evident that whoever wrote and sent this email was in a rush and did not proofread their own work and also did not get someone else to proofread the work.  (And, if they did, then….well…I will leave it at that ) You should ALWAYS proofread your work, and even get someone else to give it a once-over before you hit the “send” button.  In addition to proofreading, you should also send out test emails to yourself or fellow staffers, to make sure that it is functioning properly and that it looks just how you want it to look.

3. The subject line used in this email reads “get your spring glow NOW.”  This is a weak subject line because it does not give a peek of what you can find inside the email; it pretty much IS all of what is inside this email.  The actual content of this email itself is not much more than what is listed in the subject line.  In the article “15 Email-Marketing Best Practices”, Mitchell Harper says “When your email arrives in your subscriber’s inbox, you generally have about half a second to catch their attention with the subject line of your email. After this, they will either delete your email or ignore it.”  He later suggests, “In your subject line, try and specify a benefit that the subscriber can expect by reading your email.”

4. Here is something that you may not be able to see in the screen shot:  All of the recipients of the email are visible.  It is an email marketing best practice to not disclose the email addresses of the recipients of your email.  It allows your customers privacy.

5. Second thing that you cannot tell just by viewing this screen shot:  there is not a single link within this email! How is the consumer supposed to dive in deeper and get more information? This is a major rookie mistake.  This particular business has a website.  Why would you not want to drive more traffic to your site?  This is a missed opportunity indeed.

6. There is no unsubscribe option given in this email.  According to Wikipedia, “The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, signed into law by President George W. Bush on December 16, 2003, establishes the United States’ first national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail and requires the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to enforce its provisions.”  Wikipedia later explains that under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, “A visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism must be present in all emails.”  This gives your customer the option of no longer receiving your business’ marketing emails.  Furthermore, if your customer decides to unsubscribe from your emails, you have 10 days to honor their request.

7. They are not promoting or offering anything worth my time to take any action here: no percentage off, no BOGO (buy one get one), no sale information.  You get the picture.  What are they trying to get me to do here?  And, an even better question: what are they willing to do to get me there?  There was no planning involved in this email.  Try to offer your readers something unique in each email that you send, whether it be a promotion or an important news story relevant to your business.

8. The are no images in the email to catch the reader’s attention.  It is not a necessity to include imagery in your email content.  However, it is a good idea.  Pleasant and relevant imagery can catch the reader’s attention.  Even something as simple as including your company’s logo can help to build your brand recognition.

9. Another not so obvious factor:  this email was sent out on a Monday.  According to the article by Mitchell Harper entitled “15 Email-Marketing Best Practices”: ”Studies conducted by online research analysts have shown that the best days to perform a mail-out to your list are Tuesday and Wednesday, as this is when people are more receptive to communication. This means that they are more likely to read your content and click on links, meaning more sales. On Mondays, everyone is still recovering from a hectic weekend. On Thursday and Friday, people are already too busy looking forward to the weekend.”

Search Influence‘s in-house email marketing guru, Janna Vastola, adds that she believes “The best time to send is Tuesday between 9-10 am.”

These are only a few basic email marketing tips. Essentially, what you put in is what you will get out.  First impressions are everything.  If your customers open an email from your business, such as the one outlined in this blog, they may not open another one, if it makes its way into their inbox.

Take your time, plan and have a purpose for your email.  No matter how many email addresses you have on your email marketing list, they are all valuable to your business.  Your customers’ time is also valuable.  Make it worth their time to open your email and actually get something out of it.  Just because you operate a small business does not mean that you cannot create an email marketing campaign that rivals the biggest and best! 

{ Prepare + Promote + Proofread + Professionalism = Positive Brand Image + Conversions + ROI (Return on Investment) }

Resources:

• 15 Email-Marketing Best Practices by Mitchell Harper via www.interspire.com
• Wikipedia
• Many thanks to fellow Search Influencer, Janna Vastola, for her comments.

Photo Credits:

• “Pug Shot” http://www.flickr.com/photos/jerry_reynolds/1449005045
• “Privacy, Please!” http://www.flickr.com/photos/nitot/3488350975
• “Unsubscribe” http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnhaydon/4349744825
• “Weakest Link”  http://www.flickr.com/photos/96dpi/3371440496