How to Enter the Magical World of Email Marketing

Just think about ROI: according to a Litmus study, every dollar spent returns an average of 42 dollars. But since most of us have tried our hand at email marketing at least once, often with mediocre results, what did we get wrong? Let’s look at a few tips and useful numbers for building an email campaign that works for your customers (and beyond).

We are flooded with emails, often of less than stellar quality, and it’s hard to give our time to yet another unsolicited sales message. Especially when it completely ignores your experience and the kind of interactions you’ve already had with the brand. An example? A few weeks ago I got an email from a store offering me a big discount on a product… that I had bought at full price the week before! To work, email marketing has to be personalized and personal, and it all starts with good audience segmentation. Except in rare cases, such as sending service information, a single mailing list is never productive, even when the body text is identical. We’ll see why shortly, but first let’s imagine a possible segmentation for a company with its own e-commerce store:

• blog and newsletter subscribers;
• people who signed up for a special offer or a prize contest;
• customers with at least one active order;
• customers who canceled a purchase or abandoned their cart;
• users who speak a given language;
• users from a specific country;
• customers with a lifetime value above x;
• customers whose last purchase was x months ago;
• customers who have used coupons.

Many email marketing platforms offer excellent documentation for pulling the data these lists need from your website automatically and in real time. You can also segment subscribers who clicked a link in an email or simply opened a previous campaign. Each list helps you tailor your message to the relationship that specific user has with the brand, offering content that better matches their expectations. And that’s not all: even when you send the same content, splitting it into specific segments lets you analyze which users respond best to your messages.

To stay as compatible as possible with different clients and devices, an optimized email is often more content than form. That’s why writing material that works and is interesting and useful sits at the heart of any self-respecting email marketing strategy. Here, too, segmentation helps answer the most important question at this stage: why did the user give you their email address? Let’s look at a few examples of user needs, again based on an e-commerce site:

• they want a newsletter with the most important news;
• they want to receive discounts and offers;
• they have an affinity with the brand;
• they are interested in new products in stock;
• they love receiving resources useful for their work or hobby.

Once you understand what your audience really cares about, you can list the topics and formats best suited to each category. To check whether the list is right, the most common method is to try different content and see which users respond positively, and how many. Another method, more precise and less holistic, is to ask the people concerned directly when they sign up, or later on with annual or semiannual surveys sent by email. Once you understand your customers’ needs and have found the topics to cover, all that’s left is to write and assemble the content. Yes, that’s no small task! Of course, nobody expects an email to have the punchy, engaging copy of a website homepage, but it’s important that the email contains useful and, above all, relevant information for the reader. Every campaign must be designed with the user’s needs at its center, because email is our way of saying thank you for the trust people have placed in us and the interest they have shown.

There’s no single answer to this question, because every brand, and therefore every target audience, has very different needs and messages. We’ve seen excellent results with monthly email marketing campaigns, such as an increase from 1000 to 5000 subscribers in one year for a trade association’s daily newsletter. On average, one email a month or every two months is the right amount for many, unless there’s some interesting content to share with customers or users. Once you’ve decided the frequency for a given email marketing campaign, it’s important to try to stick to it and to produce original content consistently.

Unfortunately, as almost always in marketing, the correct answer is “it depends.” It depends on the industry, the target audience and other factors that can significantly change the open rate. Generally productive times for sending emails are 9 a.m. and 2 p.m., while the best days tend to be Thursday and Friday. Of course, you’ll find people with data to back them up telling you about amazing email marketing campaigns sent on Sunday at 6 a.m.… so the best idea is to experiment and compare results. Be careful if you have subscribers from all over the world: if you blast your messages without considering time zones, some of your users will receive emails at 3 a.m., and they’ll essentially be wasted. If possible, it’s better to send emails segmented by country or time zone, so they all arrive at the best time of day. Some services offer timed sending of emails based on the subscriber’s country, with no intervention needed from the author.

While there are fairly effective heuristic methods for judging a campaign, nothing beats good old analysis of results through the most important metrics. Let’s take a look at some of them.

The open rate is the percentage of people who opened an email out of the total number sent. Be careful not to treat it as a universal, accurate metric, though: many email clients don’t download or display images without user action, which blocks the pixel used to track performance. The Open Rate is, however, always useful for tracking how an email performs compared with previous ones, or for analyzing content and form, for example comparing the effectiveness of one subject line against another in an A/B test. If you want some percentages to get a sense of the numbers, you can take a look at the benchmarks published by Mailchimp, which show that 21.3% is the average open rate. The figure changes when you look at individual industries, with some showing better results and others, like e-commerce, with open rates below 16% (thank the spammers!).

This metric shows the percentage of people who clicked the CTA in the body of the email or other links within it. The Click Rate is the closest thing to a goal conversion in email marketing campaigns, so a CR of around 3% is generally positive, but good content can easily bring much better results, with peaks of 10-15%.

This is an annoying but essential metric for understanding whether the people you’re talking to are truly interested in your content, and in the brand. The unsubscribe rate tells you how many people clicked the “unsubscribe” link in your email out of the total sent. Keeping the Unsubscribe rate below 0.2% is a good thing, but remember that a high unsubscribe rate on one email is almost never the fault of the latest send; it points to a flawed overall communication strategy.

By setting up goals correctly in Analytics, you should be able to track conversions for every email marketing campaign you send to your subscribers. This helps us check that the overall KPIs of the digital strategy are healthy and in line with investments and expectations.

No matter how good your communication is or how useful your content, over time you’ll inevitably see users leave your mailing list. The average annual churn rate ranges from 20% to 30%. Yes, every 12 months you lose almost a third of your subscribers! So, however large your list looks, it’s important to keep an eye on this number and never stop generating new contacts!

Good email marketing needs just two ingredients: good contact segmentation and useful content to share with those contacts. Of course, to get good results, these ingredients must be top quality. If you treat your users with care and attention, they’ll do the same for your brand!