The way peo­ple inter­act with your emails tells you every­thing about your mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy. Are you send­ing valu­able con­tent? You’ll see the feed­back reflect­ed in your open and click rates. Is your email list accu­rate? Your bounce rates, spam com­plaints, and oth­er met­rics will show you. If those num­bers aren’t mak­ing you hap­py, it’s in your pow­er to improve them.

To see where you stand, let’s take a look at indus­try bench­marks. These vary depend­ing on the source, so it’s dif­fi­cult to estab­lish what the most pre­cise data is. Dave Chaf­fey of Smart Insights pub­lished an in-depth study on the top­ic, gath­er­ing infor­ma­tion from sev­er­al email ser­vice providers. Here’s what he found after ana­lyz­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions of sends:

  • The aver­age open rate, across all indus­tries, varies from 14.79 per­cent (Con­stant Con­tact) to 21.33 per­cent (MailChimp).
  • The aver­age click-through rate ranges between 2.98 per­cent (Get Response) to 6.99 per­cent (Con­stant Contact).

There’s a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence between these num­bers, but they should give you some per­spec­tive on how your own emails are per­form­ing. What can you do if your met­rics are below these bench­marks, or if you want your email mar­ket­ing to be even more effec­tive? The below tac­tics will help you do just that.

1. Scrub your email lists

Hav­ing had the chance to see first­hand how much list-clean­ing helps, I can tell you that it’s a great place to start boost­ing your email engage­ment. We’ve had cus­tomers come to us with a 20 per­cent bounce rate, and after they val­i­dat­ed their list, that rate went down to less than 1 percent.

Nick Dim­itri­ou, the head of growth at email-mar­ket­ing ser­vice Moosend, con­firms how impor­tant email hygiene is. “While con­tent and vol­ume great­ly influ­ence your email deliv­er­abil­i­ty,” Dim­itri­ou told me, “the qual­i­ty of your mail­ing list also has an impact. To increase engage­ment, ver­i­fy whether your con­tacts are valid and deliv­er­able, and do it regularly.”

So how exact­ly do you go about check­ing the qual­i­ty of your list? “Using a good email val­i­da­tion sys­tem helps you remove bad con­tacts from your list and boosts your over­all per­for­mance,” Dim­itri­ou added. “This way, you avoid the risk of being fil­tered out by mail­box providers, and you have peace of mind know­ing you com­mu­ni­cate with real people.”

2. Test your content for what works best

Test your content for what works best

Once you know your list is in good shape, it’s time to take a clos­er look at your con­tent. Start by ana­lyz­ing your met­rics from the past six months. What type of emails got the high­est engagement?

A few aspects to focus on:

  • What respons­es did you get on trans­ac­tion­al emails ver­sus mar­ket­ing offers ver­sus newsletters?
  • Out of your offers and newslet­ters, which emails tend­ed to have the high­est open and click rates?
  • Does your audi­ence pre­fer short mes­sages, or is it more inclined to read longer emails?
  • Which worked bet­ter: plain-text or HTML?

It’s essen­tial to com­pare your emails against each oth­er before you start tweak­ing for bet­ter results. Every­thing can be adjust­ed, but first, pay atten­tion to what your sub­scribers like so you can give them more of that.

When it comes to writ­ing, there are plen­ty of tac­tics that boost engage­ment. In a recent inter­view with Zero Bounce, copy­writer Lau­ra Belgray advised: “Write con­ver­sa­tion­al­ly, as if you’re writ­ing to one friend — not for­mal­ly, to a group. Put effort into the sub­ject line, mak­ing it intrigu­ing and also infor­mal, as it’s from a friend.”

Accord­ing to research from Business2Community, 47 per­cent of peo­ple decide whether to open an email just by scan­ning the sub­ject line. Try Belgray’s sug­ges­tions next time you write yours.

3. Score your contacts to identify the ones most likely to engage 

List hygiene and con­tent play an essen­tial role in your inbox place­ment and engage­ment rates, but what if you’ve val­i­dat­ed your list and improved your con­tent, and you still can’t seem to get bet­ter respons­es? You could take things a step fur­ther and try an email-scor­ing ser­vice. The process is sim­i­lar to clean­ing your list, but you get more in-depth data.

An email-scor­ing sys­tem exam­ines every email address in your data­base and assigns a score to each. Based on the activ­i­ty lev­els it detects, the sys­tem pre­dicts how like­ly a cer­tain email user is to engage with your mes­sages. A low score indi­cates the address is inac­tive and thus unlike­ly to react. The high­er the score, the more you can focus on those con­tacts and re-engage them with tar­get­ed campaigns.

Email scor­ing helps you learn more about your sub­scribers’ behav­ior before you even email them. By allow­ing you to make every email count, it can save time and resources.

Here are a few final, bonus point­ers to help boost open and click-through rates:

  • Test every­thing — your design, con­tent, sub­ject lines, place­ment of call-to-action but­tons — but test only one thing at a time so you can make accu­rate observations.
  • Use all the data you’ve gath­ered in your email address col­lec­tion process to split your email lists and send tar­get­ed campaigns.
  • Write con­tent that’s help­ful and gen­er­ous. Peo­ple will like and remem­ber you if you help to improve their busi­ness­es and lives.
  • Look at email mar­ket­ing as a fun task. The more fun you have, the more you’re going to enjoy writ­ing them. When your sub­scribers sense that, they’re more like­ly to respond.

SOURCE: Entre­pre­neur