How Effective Are Your Email Campaigns

So you’ve hopped on the Internet bandwagon and you’re interested in using it as a marketing tool. A few hundred clicks around the web later and you probably have more questions about direct marketing through email than answers.

We try to make creating an email marketing campaign as painless as possible, but we realize that most people need to better understand the terminology before they’ll be comfortable in the direct email marketing environment.

Here’s the first in our series of Internet marketing vocabulary lessons. If you’d like us to help you understand lingo that you find on the Internet, drop us a line. We’d be happy to help!

There are three “rates” you might use to judge how your email or newsletter campaign is received:

Open Rate The open rate is the percentage of emails you send that are opened. If you send 1000 emails and 230 recipients open them, you have a 23% open rate.

Click-through Rate This number indicates the percentage of people who, upon opening your email, click onto a URL or web link you have inserted into the email. Oftentimes this will link back to your website, a blog, a product video, your social network, or an online order page.

Conversion Rate Your conversion rate is how many email recipients respond to a specific call to action in your email campaign. This can be measured through email responses, phone calls, or direct sales.

There are many tricks and tips to helping open, click-through, and conversion rates climb. Start by looking at the first things your recipients will see: your company’s name and the subject line of the email. If you own Joe’s Widgets and plan to have a sale, you might enter your company’s name to show up as Joe’s Widgets Preferred Customer Club. Your subject line should cause excitement. Which sounds better, a sale? or an annual blowout sale?

Think of the words that excite you and prompt you to act and apply those to your business proposition in a way that’s unique to what you offer. Next, use our program to address your recipients by name. That familiarity and personal connectedness lends to stronger click-through and conversion rates.

We know it can take a few tries to get the hang of it, which is why Online Outbox offers a free trial and now an unlimited basic package at no charge.  We want you to get the most out of your online marketing campaign through our easy to navigate tools and features. Click here to try us out…gratis!