Email Marketing is one of the primary facets of digital marketing. Long before marketers relied on content marketing via blogs and social media, email marketing was the norm. The success of email marketing essentially relied on the number generated i.e. open rates and click-through rates.
Although with the bombardment of advertisements and content from everywhere, the attention span of the recipients shrinks. According to an article by EarthWeb, an average person receives between 100-120 emails on a daily basis. Therefore, it becomes, even more, trickier for even the top digital marketing companies to crack the code of better open and click-through rates.
To help you and provide plausible solutions, we have extrapolated various factors associated with open rates and CTR, and multiple tips that can be used to improve these numbers.
What are Open Rates and Click-through Rates?
Open rates and click-through rates are tightly knit quantities in an email marketing campaign. Open rates measure the number of recipients that opened an email in contrast to the total number of recipients that got the mail.
Open rates are primarily affected by the subject line and the preview of the email. The more value it provides to the user, the higher the user’s chance to open up the mail.
On the other hand, CTR or click-through rates are the percentage of email recipients who opened the email and clicked the link provided or CTA (call to action) in the email in contrast to the total number of impressions.
Open rate formula:
Open Rate = (total number of individual opens/total number of recipients)*100
CTR or Click-through Rate Formula:
Click-through Rates = (Number of CTA click/Number of email impressions or opens)*100
What is the importance of Open and Click-through Rates?
Both open rates and click-through rates are important metrics. These are important because they emphasize the success of your email marketing campaigns or any CTA’s on the website in general.
An open rate describes whether the subject line and the preview provided to the email recipient resonate with it. If it didn’t work, it simply means that either the message wasn’t powerful enough or the recipient simply didn’t need your services.
The story with CTR is also similar, however, it does mean to an extent that the people who opened up the mail may be parties looking for a similar solution. CTR describes the success of the copy to provide value to the user so that they are compelled to reach your website. If the CTR isn’t high, it means either the user didn’t resonate with the value provided in the copy or the copy was itself was weak.
Ideal Open Rate for a Campaign: between 17%-28%
Ideal CTR for a campaign: anything above 3%
How can Open and Click-through Rates affect your marketing campaign?
We have already stated that the open and click-through rates of a marketing campaign tell the story of the message provided. However, the core reason behind a marketing campaign is two-faceted. One would spread awareness and the other would be to generate leads. Adding to it, spreading awareness is also a part of aggregating leads through marketing.
With the metrics of open and click-through rates, marketers can understand the effectiveness of the messaging. Adding to it, it also describes the number of plausible leads that may be interested in the product.
In fact, marketers often A/B test two emails to check which one provided results in terms of conversion. By judging these metrics, marketers are able to judge the success rate of the campaign. Also, they are capable of understanding whether they need to make changes in the tonality of the message, the length, the design, or anything else that will create more engagement during the next campaign.
If a company has multiple products for instance educational courses, clothing items, or any consumables or services, the open rate, and CTR are able to provide the amount of interest the target audience is taking in the product.
Tips for Maximizing Open and Click-through Rates!
These are some of the best tips for maximizing open and click-through rates used by the top digital marketing agencies:
Rework the Email List
Many times email marketers are often caught in the rut of sending emails to thousands of recipients who aren’t even interested. Having a huge email list doesn’t increase the chances of getting noticed. Consider this, no one wants thousands of customers who might visit and check out the product. Instead, we require people who are genuinely interested in the product.
As the rule of marketing says, “You don’t sell a pen to a person who is not looking for a pen”. This is the reason it is important to make the email recipient list as lean as possible. There are options to unsubscribe email listers if they have been inactive for more than 60 days. To finalize the unsubscribe process, one can send a personalized email to the recipients. Once that is done, the remaining people in your mailer are your plausible customers. One can think of growing this list by generating leads but making the mailer list lean is always a good idea. It gives a correct picture of the metrics and the way recipients have interacted with emails sent by you.
Provide Brand Name in the Message
Marketing works on creating awareness. However, one very powerful thing that often multiple marketers often forget to focus on is brand association. Have you ever wondered “I have seen it somewhere but I don’t remember where”. This is what you call a classic case of brand association. By using your name or your brand name, you are creating the brand association. Even if the recipient simply skimmed through your email while checking the inbox, the information is mostly fed into their subconscious. The second time they receive a mail from your side and if they are your plausible customers, the chances of opening the email would be much higher.
Create Mobile-Friendly Emails
There are billions of people on this planet and so is the number of smartphones. It's highly unlikely for any firm today to not take advantage of mobile technology or mobile marketing. However, a lot of marketers fail to optimize their mailers for mobile. This is the reason it is important to optimize these emails so that they are easily readable on mobile devices.
Personalize Emails based on Segmentation
Segmentation is an important part of email marketing. It is important to segment recipients based on engagement. The users that engaged with the emails the most have the highest chances of conversion.
Once the segmentation is done, it is important to send personalized emails to the ones that have engaged the most. It is because the chances of them converting into a customer are much higher instead of the leads that were only lukewarm.
Work on the Writing
Running an email campaign doesn’t mean that one can construct a simple message, send it to the mailing list, and let the magic happen. This is not how the magic happens. Instead, one needs to carefully construct an email that explores the USP of the products. However, a better way to start a mailer content would be by initially pressing on the pain points of the customer.
Establishing the pain points first works as a hook for many people. After the mailing content has the attention of the user, one can extrapolate on the USP of the product or the service being offered. It would allow the user to understand the product better and help them understand, how it can resolve the problem. This bit of information can also be extrapolated by the copywriter constructing the message.
Focus on the Preview
Focusing on the preview is empirical considering it completely controls the open rate of an email. An email preview basically consists of three parts i.e. sender, subject line, and the preview text.
It is important to understand that each of these parts plays an important role. The name of the preview is itself a sign of credibility if the user already knows about the brand. However with careful messaging, if this is the first time the recipient is seeing your company name, it is highly likely that a good subject line and preview text can create a brand association.
Now the subject line should be crisp and should explain the content inside in a few words but clearly. Adding to it, the preview text can use additional metadata to provide more value about the information encapsulated in the email. Nailing these three parts of the email mean exceptionally good open rates.
Pay Attention to the CTAs
The CTA within a mailer need to be enticing enough to be clicked by the recipient. It should resonate with the brand color and the messaging should be warm or curious enough to compel the visitor to click through it and reach your website.
Measure Results
It is important to measure results. Once a campaign has been ran the ideal time to collect the data for the metrics could be 3 days. The chances of getting the maximum number of engagements is within the first 24 hours. Till the 3rd day, it is the next window. After that, the chances of any major increase in the metrics is highly unlikely especially if we talk about email marketing campaigns.
Wrapping Up!
Understanding the metrics of open rates and click-through rates is not rocket science. In fact, these numbers are pretty handy to make marketers understand, if there are changes they need to make. Adding to it, finding ways to improve these numbers is a constant process. One needs to carefully assess the trends, campaigns, type of language & tonality, and constantly revamp their email marketing strategies. Improving open rates and click-through rates is a constant struggle that changes with time, however, one should most likely try to assess data, experiment a bit, and upgrade their process.