Should I Stay or Should I Go? How to Determine the Effectiveness of Your Email Marketing Campaign

Every morning, your potential customers receive emails about products, services, promotions and requests. While some businesses build a customer following, others end up with their emails unopened or the dreaded “unsubscribed” message. Potential customers are perpetually asking themselves “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” With all these daily decisions, where does your email marketing campaign land?

There are some important tips that can help build successful email marketing campaigns. The golden rule is to build compelling content that your potential customers need. Along with great content, is the need to design a persuasive subject line that leads your reader to search further. The final tip for designing an email marketing campaign is when, and how often to send out information. Read more detail about designing an email marketing campaign in three of our prior posts.

Once you have what you should write and when to share it completed for your email marketing, it is time to measure the effectiveness for your campaign. Four measures can provide you with information about how you are doing. These four measures each give you unique insight into the effectiveness:

1. Open Rate – you should expect at least 15-25% open rate for your email campaign. If the open rate is lower, start by examining your subject line titles and making adjustments to them.
2. Click-through rate – this measures how effectively your campaign inspires your target audience to respond to a call-for-action. One report suggests that an average click-rate for campaigns is almost 7%, or roughly 30% of the average open-rate. If your click-rate is less, start by making the call-for-action text bold or highlighted for better visibility.
3. Unsubscribe rate – this measure shows the level of engagement of the audience and the relevance of the content provided. Unsubscribe rates average is about 0.13%, but experts suggest that you should target zero as your unsubscribe rate. It is important to review the relevance of your communications, and also the frequency of your messages.
4. Conversion rate – this measures the number of individuals that completed the action that your campaign intended to promote. Experts note that conversions rates between 1-3% of total website traffic is the norm.  Two ways to improve conversion rate is to ensure the landing page is well designed, and that any forms which a customer needs to complete is easy to follow.

Email marketing has grown over time, with businesses competing for the attention of the same target audience. Make sure that you use metrics that measure effectiveness of email marketing campaigns. Follow up by making relevant adjustments to your campaign. Then the next time your target audience contemplates the question: “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” they are sure to choose to stay.