PosterMyWall live class: Improve your email campaign performance
Are your email campaigns performing as well as they could be? In this week’s live class, Matt Snyder, founder of CopywriterCreative, helps you crack the code by sharing how to measure your campaign’s success and 10 steps to crafting better emails.
If you missed the class, watch the replay video above. Or, if you prefer, read on for a summary of Matt’s presentation.
5 key metrics for tracking email campaign performance
Matt says conducting a mini audit by measuring the following 5 aspects of your email campaign’s performance:
Open rate
Matt suggests that you start the audit process by looking at your email campaign’s open rate. Average open rates fall between 21% and 30% so this is a good benchmark to compare your results against.
It’s also important to track your open rates over time to determine where you are in comparison with your own previous efforts. Are you improving–or are you losing ground? By tracking this, you can study what tactics and copy have brought you the most success so that you can apply the same approaches to future campaigns.
If you want to improve your open rate, Matt suggests that you start by taking a hard look at your subject lines, audience, and frequency. (He shares tips related to subject line later in the session.)
Audience is a matter of making sure that the people you are sending your emails to are the people you want to reach. Low open rates can be a signal that the people you’re emailing are not—in fact—interested in your product or service.
The ideal frequency for sending emails will vary by audience—but it’s important to understand what that frequency is for your audience. If you send your emails too frequently, people will stop opening them all. But if you wait too long between emails, people may forget who you are or lose interest in you.
Click-thru rate (CTR)
CTR is the percentage of subscribers who click on a link in your email. Average CTRs range from 2.6% to 5% depending on your industry.
Matt says that the best way to improve your CTR is by testing different calls to action and by placing the links at multiple places in your email. Track your results over time to see what copy, approach, offer, and placement works best with your audience.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate tells you the percentage of emails that cannot be delivered to an email server. Matt’s tips for improving your bounce rate are: use a custom email domain rather than a free email domain and keep your list up-to-date.
Unsubscribes
While receiving unsubscribes is normal, a high number of unsubscribes may mean that something is off. You could be offending people, emailing them too often, or possibly emailing the wrong audience. So if you see your unsubscribe rate rise, you may want to do some research to find out why.
Conversion rate
Make sure you’re getting more out of your emails than what you’re putting into them. Matt says to use something you can count such as the number of products sold, amount of projects/services booked, number of registrations, or the number of donations received.
9 steps to crafting engaging emails
Next, Matt shared the checklist he uses either while he’s writing an emails to double check that he’s doing a good job. The following are the steps Matt uses to make sure each of his emails is as engaging as possible:
Check your audience
“If you’re sending your email to the wrong people, they aren’t going to open it,” Matt said.
Make sure your target audience is interested in the content you’re offering them.
Check your FROM address
Is it correct? And is it from a specific person at your organization? Again, using the email address of a specific person at a specific organization (i.e. Wallace@bestcleaning.com rather than sales@gmail.com) will improve deliverability and increase your open rates.
Examine your subject line
Is it simple, clear, and compelling enough to entice someone to open your email? Matt recommends you limit your subject line to 60 characters or less and that you don’t use more than one emoji.
Personalize it
If you can, include the recipient’s name. It’s best to write an email in second person. When you write in second person singular (“you” rather than “they”) your email sounds more personal.
Check the hook
Your first and second sentence will determine whether or not your reader will continue to read the rest of the email. Tactics to accomplish this include personalization, exclusivity, reciprocity, and social proof.
Clear primary CTA.
Is the call to action clear and obvious?
Secondary CTA
This is optional and can be as simple as inviting people to follow you on social media.
Check your closing
Remember that you’re sending this email from a PERSON to a PERSON. The sign-off should be appropriate (I.e. sincerely, cheers, keep writing) and from a specific person.
Write a postscript
Many people will read your headline and then scroll directly to your postscript without reading anything in between. Take advantage of this behavior by reiterating your main point or call to action at the bottom of your message.
Creating a high-performing email campaign takes some effort. But following Matt’s 10 steps will help simplify the process and improve your results.
PosterMyWall Performance Metrics
The PosterMyWall Email Marketing Platform allows you to create, send and track emails, all from one place. Track the performance of your emails from the My emails section, in your My Stuff. Refer to these guides to learn more about tracking and comparing various performance metrics to optimize your email performance.
