Good news! The email newsletter is making a comeback.
Sometimes email newsletters get a bad rap for being spammy and obnoxious without any valuable content. This was true in the past, but marketers have wised up to the potential and the willingness of people to read emails if they’re relevant.
When an email is sent to the right people with the right content, it is well received. So, if you want people to pay attention to your email you need to pay attention to the campaign data. Looking at the numbers will help you understand how people perceive your email and what they like/don’t like about it.
So what numbers should you be paying attention to? Read on to find out.
Opt outs:
These contacts have decided to unsubscribe from your email list. That’s a bummer, so why would they opt out? Sometimes it’s hard to tell, contacts can be impatient with email marketing and if they deem content dispensable, you’re gone. Constant Contact (a third party delivery tool) allows us to see why people opt out if they wish to leave a comment. Most of the time they are reasons like “moved away” or “too many emails in general”. These are understandable reasons and we would rather they opt out than feel angry or annoyed at our emails.
Don’t agonize over an individual opt out, but pay attention to the trends if the number of people opting out is increasing, you may want to reduce your frequency or segment your list and send more focused content to small subsets of your overall list.
Opens:
How many people take a few seconds to read what you have to say? Your open rate is a good indication of how well your subject lines are working. Are you grabbing someone’s attention, convincing them to read your email now?
The subject line is not the only the reason people do or don’t open your emails. The time of day and the day of the week can also influence reader behavior, but if your open rate falls, the subject line is a great place to start to improve your campaign.
Clicks:
Clicks let you know what people found interesting and wanted to know more about. Calls to action are great for getting people to navigate back to your website. Pay attention to the type of content people seem to click on more often to really maximize the impact of your newsletter to your web traffic.
Fresh list:
Opt-outs are just a part of the email newsletter campaign process. People will leave or stop opening them depending on their wants and needs. To combat this, keep your list fresh and continue to add good quality contacts that want to hear from you.
Bounces:
Bounces mean that the email could not be delivered due to the email address itself. These aren’t anything to worry much about; the contact most likely changed their email address or got a new job. It is important to go back and delete these email addresses from your list to keep it fresh and full of quality contacts.
If you are familiar with Constant Contact, this information is easily accessible and simple to understand. Just sending emails out into the world is not doing you much good and probably annoying a lot of people in the process. To learn more about Constant Contact and how to use email newsletters to your advantage, attend one of our free seminars.
