Catch up on Email Marketing Part One: Constructing your Email, and Email Marketing Part Two: Getting People Engaged.
Once your emails have been written and coded the work doesn’t stop there. Keeping an eye on the analytics of your emails provides valuable insight for future email campaigns.
Opens
The number of people opening your email is the best indicator about the performance of your subject lines. If you’re finding that you are getting a low open rate, you might want to have a look at trying something different in your subject lines.
Click-throughs
Seeing what links are being clicked reflects what content your audience is really interested in. Just like web analytics is essential, keeping up with the interests of your email audience will help create more targeted and relevant content.
Click-throughs can also help you identify design flaws. If no one is clicking on a link, check to make sure that it isn’t hidden among the rest of the content, or isn’t broken.
Devices
Keeping an eye on the devices which people are using to read your email is a useful key to building your next email. Testing to make sure your email is working on any device is always important. But knowing the specifics of the devices and email clients that the email is being read on is helpful to ensure that your emails are fully optimised for your audience.
Unsubscribes
Keeping tabs on the number of people that are unsubscribing from your email gives you important insight into your campaign. An unsubscribe rate of 2% is quite normal for each campaign you send out. While there will always be people unsubscribing from your list, spikes in unsubscribes can give you insight into how your emails are being received. If you double the frequency of your emails and see a huge spike in the number of unsubscribes that’s probably a sign that you should slow down on the send outs.
A/B Testing
Once you’ve set up and understood all about analytics, you can begin to do A/B testing of your emails.
A/B testing is essentially creating two versions of your email and sending both of them to a small sample of your mailing list. Once the emails have been sent you can go through the analytics and see which version of the email performed better.
Using A/B testing is a great tool to see which subject lines are performing better. If you have a huge mailing list you might send your email with subject line one to 1% of your mailing list, and subject line two to another 1% of your mailing list. After giving people a chance to see your email you can send your emails with the best performing subject line to the remaining 98% of your list.
Testing different times of the day and days of the week can also help you identify the best time to do your send outs.
When it comes to A/B testing- the sky is the limit. Don’t just think it’s about subject lines and timing, A/B testing can be used for almost anything ranging from length of email, to layout, to choosing the best image.
