It’s no secret: If you’re sending email marketing campaigns, you need to have a strategy in place to ensure your campaigns are successful. Bulk mail marketing solutions usually offer various ways of tracking your SMS and email campaigns. Coupled with Google Analytics, you can gain insightful metrics to help you reach your intended contacts, and see how they engage with your campaigns.

Open Rates

Whenever someone sends an email they hope the recipient to open the message. It is a key metric marketers take for granted because it’s so obvious. Therefore, it is necessary for you to ask what is considered a good open rate for your industry goals.
South Africa 25 percent is considered the average open rate for emails and 99 percent for SMSs. If you’re hitting those numbers, then you can be sure you’re doing well.

Here are key considerations to look at before sending out your emails:

Audience: people are very selective of the emails they open. Assess your audience and find content that will encourage them to open your emails.
Relevant, valuable content: Subject line, “from” email address, and the first few lines of your email tell your contact what they can expect in the remainder of the email. Use these to show your audience that your email is valuable to them and worth opening.
Importance: Subscribers like to be kept in the loop on important developments, especially regarding their industry and other relevant information such as price increases, changes in policy, new client relationship managers and anything else that affects their business, positively or negatively.
Subscriptions/Newsletters: Contacts are more likely to open emails they have subscribed to. The open rate increases when it combines the previously mentioned points, coupled with clever personalisation and a call-to-action.
POPI Act: The POPI Act ensures that companies and individuals protect and respect subscribers’ personal information. Subscribers knowing this will be more likely to open messages from trustworthy sources.

For more information on the PoPI act, read our white paper: Guide to Navigating PoPI
An example of how the above mentioned points worked well for our Everlytic clients can be read in our Guide to Best Performing Emails: Open Rates.

Click-Through-Rates

Click-Through-Rates (CTR) are the total number of unique clicks a link in your mail receives. This means if one person clicks multiple times on the same email, it still counts as one click. Unique. The average click rate in South Africa is 3% and there are multiple ways of achieving a higher CTR such as call-to-action buttons.

A contact opening an email is just the first step in the process. You want to ensure that it was worth their time with informative content. Set up links and call-to-action buttons where contacts will be redirected to a landing page with more information.
Incentives are a fantastic way to get high CTRs, as well as useful information about your audience which you can use for personalisation. An example would be completing a questionnaire with an entry to a prize for successfully submitting it.
With the information gathered from a subscription form or survey, you can generate content that directly targets specific contacts based on their choices.

You can also read more in the second part of Guide to Best Performing Emails: Click Rates.

Page Views / Unique visitors

Marketing campaigns can redirect contacts to your website, allowing you to see how many unique visitors/web page hits you receive.

Using vanity URLs (specific page on your website) linked to a call-to-action button, you can direct traffic to a particular page on your website.
If you have Google Analytics, you can use UTMs (custom URLs for tracking campaigns) linked with Google Analytics for extensive reports on campaigns and page views.

You can read up on Vanity URLs, UTMs, and Google Analytics in our articles:

Vanity URLs, UTM Codes, Google Analytics.

Subscribe/Unsubscribe Rate

As a business, sending emails is more than just reads, opens, and page views. Contacts receiving your emails are either interested in what you offer, or they aren’t. Those who are will be more than likely to subscribe to your newsletter (if you have one), and those who are genuinely not interested, will unsubscribe. Work to gain a 5 percent conversion rate (people subscribing to your newsletter), and try not to lose subscribers. There are many factors that contribute to either one, from sending too many emails to not sending enough emails. From too many images to too few images. You can read our guide to Understanding Unsubscribes for more information.

Bounce Rate – Soft and Hard

Bounces are emails that do not make it to your contact’s email inbox due to a variety of reasons. There are two types of bounces that occur:

A soft bounce is a temporary error where an email is received by the recipient’s mail server but isn’t delivered to the inbox.
It can be caused by the size of the message or an attachment exceeding the mail server limit.
The email domain may also be temporarily unavailable or the recipient’s inbox full.
The server will hold these emails until the problem is resolved.

A hard bounce is a permanent error where the mail server doesn’t receive the email at all.
This may be due to an invalid email address, or the domain of the recipient doesn’t exist or has closed.
It is imperative that you remove any contact whose email address has a hard bounce. If you keep sending emails to it, the ISP (internet service provider) lowers your reputation and may result in your company being deemed a spammer.

The Power of Metrics

Bulk mail services provide a number of metrics for both your Email and SMS campaigns. Reports contributing to the points discussed above can be collected to assist in bettering your mailers. Read up on the types of metrics you can glean, ensuring you have an informed marketing strategy for your future campaigns.