Email Marketing: Levels of Success

Millions of marketing emails are sent each day trying to get people to buy a product or a service. Some of these emails, if they find way into our inboxes, face a second challenge, being opened.

From a marketer’s perspective, the email is successful if a. was delivered to the recipient’s inbox, b. was opened, c. was read (not skimmed), d. a call to action element was clicked, and e. most importantly, turned into a sale. And in reality, for some marketers, if b. is reached it’s seen as success.

There are many components in an email that help its success in inbox.

a. was delivered to the recipient’s inbox

Let’s look at this one first because if your email doesn’t get delivered it surely won’t be clicked. There are a few things that can help you get your email delivered to inboxes. First your email sender reputation needs to be in good standing. If you’ve not spammed anyone, and if you are following a double opt in mechanism, then there is a good chance that your reputation is in a good place.

Some of the things you can do to harm your reputation are, buying email lists, entering email addresses that you scrape off of internet, not having a proper opt in mechanism in place are all considered bad practices and may result in your sending domain to get blocked.

Another important factor, which is more on the technical side, is to have proper SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records set up in your email sending platform. Your IT department or email sending platform provider should be able to provide you with guidance on this piece. These 3 records, when setup correctly, notify email servers of your identity which in turn lets them allow your emails to go through.

b. was opened

This is a bit of an alchemy. One of the most important factors in having your email opened is driven by a successful subject line. The other factor is the timeliness of your email. Where I work, we constantly test our send days and times. For example if there is a long weekend we try not to send any emails at all knowing some of the audience may already have taken the week off which would result in low open rates. Similarly, Mondays and Fridays usually get the lowest open rates, at least this is what we’ve learned from our audience.

If your email sending platform has a feature that leverages the recipient’s timezone, then usually best times to send an email is between 10:30–11:00 AM or 4–5 PM. These are the times when people usually have a small break to catch up with their emails.

There are many email sending platforms that will allow you to run your A/B tests. For example, to understand your audience better, you can send one half of your email at 11 AM and the other half at 4 PM then measure the results in open rates between the two sends. Once you have this nailed down, then you can move on to the next.

c. was read (not skimmed)

This metric is also available on some platforms where you can see how many people actually read your email. I tie this to the relevancy of the email to the audience. Again, the more you know your audience the higher your read rate will be. And to know your audience better you will need to collect more data. The better you can target your audience and the more relevant messaging you deliver to their inbox, the more value you actually deliver to your customers.

d. a call to action element was clicked

Believe it or not, I still see some emails from known brands land in my inbox without clear call to action. Hey, you made me open and read your email, was that all there is to it, really? Emails need to be actionable, they need to let me know what I need to do next with a clear call to action. Do you want me to purchase something, or sign a petition, or send you a review? Tell me! And make it clear on the email. Oh, and don’t over populate, just 1 or 2 call to actions will be enough.

e. most importantly, turned into a sale.

The holy grail of an email. You’ve designed your email, built the content, targeted your audience, selected your subject line, time of the day, your call to actions, and you hit send! With everything in good order, your audience responded back to you with their orders! A magical moment, now go and celebrate that hard work you put into your email!

In closing, jokes aside, when you’re running a well maintained list, have a clear understanding of who your audience is, and if you build emails that are well designed with thoughtful content, you will start to see a better return on your investment.

Please let me know if you have any stories to share or if I left a critical part of an email that needs to be mentioned here. I’d love to hear from you.