If you ever have been involved in a campaign or organization you know that effective use of email is paramount to your group's success. Abby's last blog post detailed how to write effective fundraising emails. The next step is learning how to track and analyze your email campaigns.
Reviewing and understanding email data helps you know how you are performing, where improvements could be made, and protecting your list from being diminished and possibly destroyed (blacklisted).
Every mass email you send through a professional service (i.e. not from your personal email account) will contain statistics about its results. Below are the four main numbers to keep an eye on and what they mean for you.
Open Rates
An email service provider will offer data on the number of emails sent and the number of bounces. The number of people who actually receive your email is: emails sent less number of bounces. The open rate is the percentage of recipients who received your message and actually opened it. For those equation-minded folk: Open Rate = Emails Opened / (Emails Sent - Bounces).
What to Expect
Expect numbers between 20 and 35 percent. An open rate of 0 percent almost always indicates a service or technical failure. Check with your provider in this case.
Bottom line: Not many people are going to even read your email. This shouldn't be a surprise – how many of your daily emails do you read?
Keep In Mind
The main factors affecting the open rate are the sender and subject line, and the actual timing of delivery. People see this information before they even open your message.
Sender - You can choose the email address the message will originate from. Rather than sending from a generic info@LoganforCongress.com, it is often times better to personalize as SamLogan@LoganforCongress.com. Make certain the sender will be a recognizable and trusted person to recipients. Also, if the message is from staff or the candidate him/herself, then make sure the address reflects this appropriately.
Subject Line – A good subject line will pull readers into your message and make them excited to read what you have to say. A bad subject line will leave your message deleted or spam-boxed faster than [...something clever]. Tips for making effective email subject lines include making an announcement, making the reader curious, or emphasizing how the reader will benefit.
Time of Delivery – Make sure to know your target audience and consider the time of day and day of the week when scheduling your email blast. Think about who will be receiving your email, where they will be, and when they might have time to open and read your message. Weekday mornings Monday through Thursday (9am - 11am) is a good guesstimate for most situations.
Click-Through Rates
The click-through rate (CTR) reports the percentage of viewers who actually click on links in your email (text or images) and follow them to their respective pages. With these numbers, you can see which links performed better than others and if any were ignored altogether.
What to Expect
CTRs will vary from link to link depending on your content, the action items of your message, the amount of links, the quality of writing, and the email formatting. Because of these variables, there is no hard and fast CTR to shoot for. However it is important to notice each link's CTR in relation to each other and CTR's of previous mailings.
Keep in Mind
At the most basic level, make sure all your links are accurate (i.e. when you click on the link it sends you to the correct page). Every email service provider will have a preview stage where you can see how your email will look after it’s sent. Pay close attention at this point and make sure everything works as you intend it to.
Otherwise review your numbers, look for anomalies and investigate their causes to help fine-tune your messaging. Does your primary action item have the highest CTR? Are your image links totally being ignored? Using the data to find the answers to these types of questions is vital to improving the effectiveness of your efforts and making adjustments in future communication.
Unsubscribes
Every email service is required to provide an "Unsubscribe" link in their mailings. An unsubscribe is someone who completes this process and requests to be removed from your list.
What to Expect
With any sizeable list, there will be a natural and unavoidable unsubscribe rate. Rates of two to five percent are not unusual; however, a percentage over 10 percent is cause for concern.
Keep in Mind
If your unsubscribe rate is at or above 10 percent, you have a significant amount of people who are not interested in the material you send them and you will quickly decimate your list. When you have high unsubscribe rates, review your message to ensure it’s in tune with your recipient, make sure your email frequency is reasonable (more than once per week can be intrusive), and ensue your list wants to hear from you.
Spam Complaints
A spam complaint is when an email recipient marks or files an email as "spam" through their email service.
What to Expect
If you are sending high-quality, non-spam content at a reasonable frequency (i.e. no more than once per week) to a legitimate and high-quality list, you will likely have low spam complaints. Less than a tenth of a percent (0.1 percent) is common.
Keep in Mind
Spam complaints must be avoided as much as possible. When your spam complaints begin to exceed 0.1 percent you run the risk of getting your email service account terminated or your server IP blacklisted. Precautions you can take include making sure your list is clean, using single and double opt-in signup forms, and ensuring your content is good and relevant to the recipients.
In the end...
Email campaigns require careful planning and analysis before and after the emails are actually sent, and so far, we've only scratched the surface by covering how to write the actual content and how to track and analyze the results. The most important lesson you can take away? Always be prepared to reevaluate your email strategy if it’s not working.