Your email work begins way before you hit send. First, you have to understand what gets your emails into your contact’s inbox. Essentially, you must know how deliverable is your email. Checking your contacts list is a good place to start.
Where you get your contacts is a healthy indicator of how they will react to your email campaign. Contacts that filled out forms are good leads because:
- They showed initial interest.
- They are already expecting an email from you.
On the other end, lists that you bought are usually not as accepting of your emails. Chances are, your messages will go directly to spam.
Once you determined that you have a “healthy” contact list, you can now proceed to optimize content to fit your target market.
Optimizing begins with segmentation
Group your list based on your buyer personas. Segmentation will help you personalize content that your audience is interested in. When they read something they need or want, your audience will want to read more content from you.
Of course, you won’t always hit the mark. That’s why you have to constantly test your copy, design, your CTA, even the timing. Track your lead’s behavior. Use these pieces of information to improve your campaign.
When you send an email to leads, you want them to open it, read it, and then perform the desired action (sign-up, download, subscribe, etc.). In short, you want our leads to engage with your brand. And you want to measure these engagements so you can determine our email campaign performance.
But what factors do you measure?
There are different reasons why our emails fail to get to your lead’s inbox. If your email bounces because the email address no longer exists (hence our email can’t be delivered to the lead), it’s a hard bounce. You can remove the contact from your list.
If your email bounces because of temporary issues (a full mailbox or a network glitch), it’s considered a soft bounce.
Email delivery rate: How much of the emails you send reaches recipients? And how many emails bounce?
Open rate: How many leads opened your email?
Click through rate: How many leads opened your email and clicked through the link to your website or offer?
Conversion rate: How many contacts opened your email, clicked through the link for your website or offer, and completed the process? Conversions can mean submitting the registration form for free trial, downloading your e-book, or buying your product.
Spam report rate: How many contacts report your email as spam? If you have a high report rate, it’s time to revisit your contact list or email strategy.
A critical factor of successful email marketing is knowing and anticipating our market’s behavior. You always have to observe, always monitor, and always adapt to what emails read, when they read it, and what format they want to read it in. This way, you make sure that you deliver and optimize your email strategy.
