Posts Tagged ‘email marketing tips’

ATTN: SMALL BIZ OWNERS. Email Marketing

Is Low Cost, Targeted, Measurable, Effective.

EMarketing blog: http://helpamericaspeople.com/EWP/

 

The mission of this blog, started by the Founders of www.helpamericaspeople.com, is to raise awareness of the most cost-effective marketing tool for Small Business owners like you   >>>  EMAIL MARKETING

 

 This post concludes the six-part series on Creating an Email Marketing Plan.  Previous  posts on this topic appeared on March 2, 12, 19, 26 and April 2.

 

At this stage you should have selected an Email Service Provider (ESP).  All reputable ESP’s include Performance Reports  and Customer Support when you become a customer — at no additional cost.  Performance Reports and Customer Support are standard in the email marketing industry.

 

Not only is email marketing incredibly cost-effective, your results are virtually immediate.  Within 48 hours of hitting the SEND button (with about 75% of the results coming in the first 24 hours!), you’ll have sufficient data to give you a snapshot of how your customers and prospects responded (or didn’t respond) to your email campaign.  You’ll learn what worked and what didn’t work.  This gives you the invaluable opportunity to improve your results each time you launch an email marketing campaign.

 

Here are just a few terms you should be familiar with in order to better understand your Performance Reports and, also, to be prepared to ask pertinent questions of your ESP’s Customer Support Reps:

 

1)  Open Rate

This is an overall, but less than perfect measurement, of how many on your email list viewed your email. Why less than perfect?  

• Many email clients, i.e., Microsoft Outlook, AOL, Gmail automatically turn off images from displaying in an email.  When the images in your email don’t load, the email doesn’t register as an open.
• Some individuals choose to receive text-only emails.  With the image as the trigger, or tracking device,  text-only emails do not register as an open.
• Just because your email is opened, that doesn’t guarantee that it’s been read by the recipients.  The better measure is Clicks (discussed below).

There is some good news, however.  Your open rate is most likely an underestimate.

 

2)  Clicks

How many who opened your email, clicked on a link that asked them to take some action, such as joining your mailing list, subscribing to your enewsletter, registering for your seminar, downloading an article or whitepaper, filling out a contact form.  The clicks are a  good indication of which content and/or offer engaged the recipients who opened your email. 

 

3) Click Through Rate (CTR)

Since percentages are deeply embedded in our lives as a benchmark of success, the CTR is an important stat and determined by the following formula:  the #clicks divided by the # unique emails opened.

What’s a good percentage?  There’s no easy answer to this question.  Click Through Rates  vary by industry, content, the quality of your email lists, etc.

 

4)  Conversions

This is the key statistic.  Of the individuals who took some action , i.e., clicked on your contact form, how many actually completed the form and submitted it.  Of the individuals who clicked on the download for a white paper, how many actually downloaded the white paper….and so on.  To close the loop, of the recipients who took action, keep track of them because you’ll want to know if they ultimately purchased your product or service?

 

5)  Bounces

 In your performance report, you’ll see the number of bounces subtracted from the open rate.  These bounced emails never reached their destination.  There are two types of bounces:

A soft  bounce refers to an email not delivered due to a  temporary problem on the recipient’s end, such as a full mail box, an auto reply message set by the recipient announcing he or she is on vacation, out-of-town on business, etc. or there are technical difficulties with the server on the receiving end.  These soft bounces should be identified and sent the email again within 12 hours.

A hard bounce refers to an email that’s not delivered because the email address is invalid (not a “live” address).  Be sure to double check these bounces for typos in the email address.  You need the exact email address, otherwise the email will quickly bounce back.

 

6) Unsubscribes

Unsubscribes are  recipients who request removal of their email address from your list.  Be sure to honor their request as soon as possible.  In the return email confirming their request to unsubscribe, ask them to tell you why they unsubscribed.  This information will be very valuable to your future email marketing efforts.

 

Next Post:  Friday, April 16th.