Email Marketing may not yet seem that awesome to many. But if you are a digital marketer and don’t know the power of this medium, you are missing the woods for the trees. Presenting a guest article by Geetanjali Dighe, who is part of Juvlon team. Geetanjali shares few key email marketing metrics, based on data collected over a period of time.
What’s the Average Bounce Rate? It’s 4.72%
Bounce rate is very important for your email campaigns. A high bounce rate means that you have a lot of invalid email addresses in your database. This affects your brand and IP reputation in the long run. We recommend that generally the bounce rates should be lower than 5%. After analysing 75Million emails we found that the average bounce rate was about 4.72%. How does that compare to your campaigns?
What’s the Average Open Rate? It’s 12.45%
That’s the average email open rate we are seeing. Is your campaign doing better? Average Open rates fluctuate a lot. Email open rates vary based on day of the week, time of the day, subject-line and most important, the audience. For example welcome emails generally get more opens than regular emails. A book promotion launch email sent to a particular city will get much better open rates as the content, subject and the audience are closely coupled together. We have used re-marketing, that is engaging inactive audience, moving from full image emails to HTML emails, segregating data into segments and sending relevant content to improve the results of many campaigns.
Average Click to Open Rate is 11.61%
In the 75 million emails that we analysed, we saw a wide fluctuation in click rates as well. Click-Open-Rate is a measure of how many readers who opened the email, clicked on the email. This means that if 10% of your audience opened email and 10% of those clicked on the email, then overall only 1% of your total audience clicked the email. We have seen that click rates improve with prominent call to action, a good mix of images and text (as opposed to full text or full image emails). Relevancy and frequency are also important. Sending too frequently with not much relevant content causes “list fatigue” and give low email click rates.
What’s Email Visitor Behaviour?
What does the email visitor do on the website? What is his navigation path? What pages does he visit most? How does the Email visitor behave vs the visitor from a banner ad? These are some of the questions a digital marketer should be asking. We analysed our own email campaign data from the past 8 months. The Google Analytics code embedded on our website and email links tells us that Email visitors are highly engaged audience. We saw some very interesting results:
Email Visitors spent 30% more time on the website than regular visitors
Email Visitors also viewed more pages on our website and had much fewer bounce rate that other visitors. We are fanatical about Email readers because they take pains to open, read, click the email and visit the website. They are far more engaged and spend more time on the website, view more pages, and should be treated with respect.
Email Outcomes or Goal Conversions
Digital marketers who suffer from OOD (Obsessive Outcome Disorder to borrow Avinash Kaushik’s term. Avinash is a thought leader in Website Analytics) fret about the final outcomes of the activities of the visitors on website. How many shopped, or registered, or downloaded a white paper etc and such other metrics.
To quote from Avinash’s post:
“Email remains an immensely credible and profitable channel, with an immense reach to boot. To not have it as an active part of your marketing portfolio is sub-optimal. The only requirement is that your mental model (and indeed, company culture) should be solidly rooted in permission marketing. Every fiber of your being. Every thought that crosses your mind. Every person in your company. Embrace permission marketing and email will be a surprising and loyal BFF”
What’s your take on email marketing?
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Also see: What’s the Average Bounce Rate of Email Campaigns in India?
[For more, read our entire series on Email Marketing.]
