Email marketing metrics can be deceiving
(This originally appeared in my newsletter. Sign up now to get content like this, for free, every Monday.)
Marketing emails have three main metrics:
Open rates - the number of people who opened the email
Click through rates - the number of people who clicked a link
Unsubscribe rates - the number of people who unsubscribed
These numbers are all pretty straightforward. But quite often, I see them getting misinterpreted. Today I'm going to work through some signals these numbers are sending you, that you might be missing.
Open rates are more about your reputation and less about your subject line
The common mistake with open rates is to correlate them with your subject line. Better subject lines mean better open rates.
This is true - in one narrow case: cold emails. If someone has never heard of you or your organisation before, your subject line is the make or break point that determines whether your email gets open.
But most emails aren't cold. Most marketing emails are going to people who have heard of you in one way or the other. After all, that's why you have their email address in the first place.
So for these people, a much bigger factor in your open rates is your overall reputation with your audience. If you're in the habit of sending good content that your audience consistently gets value from, then you're going to enjoy high open rates. The converse is just as true.
That's not to discount subject lines entirely, of course. They are valuable - but only on the margin. A core "base" of people are going to open your emails because they like hearing from you; a good subject line is going to add to that base. But the best subject line in the world is no substitute for an ongoing, long relationship with your audience that you cultivate by regularly sending them content they are interested in getting.
Unsubscribes don't always mean your content sucks
Unsubscribes suck. I get a little email notification every time someone unsubscribes from this newsletter, and I hate it.
On the face of it, unsubscribes look like a sign that your content is faltering. And this can be true.
But there's another kind of unsubscribe: the people who weren't a good fit for your list in the first place.
I've run into this problem before. About a year ago, I put together a lead magnet called the one-page persuasive writing checklist. Then I ran some Facebook ads asking people to download it in exchange for signing up to this newsletter.
In the ads, I positioned the checklist as a useful resource for anyone who writes. So I got all sorts of people signing up who (I assume) wanted to get better at writing.
But that's where my value to them ended. They wanted to improve their own writing, but they didn't really want to hear about copywriting and content strategy every week or two, so they unsubscribed.
This is a drag, but it's not actually sending me any signals about my content. Rather, it was telling me that there was something broken in my lead generation. My Facebook ads were attracting a whole bunch of people who didn't care about copywriting in the first place! I highly doubt these people would ever turn into clients, so losing them from my list wasn't really that big of a deal.
So if you start to see an uptick in your unsubscribes, don't panic and change your entire content strategy. Rather, dig into those unsubscribes - are they all from the same place? Were they all on your list for a similar amount of time? If so, you might have a problem on the lead generation side rather than on the content side.
Your click-throughs don't always matter
Something like a campaign or a sales email will generally have a very specific objective: get someone to do something. And that's usually going to involve clicking a link. It might be asking people to buy now, book a demo, check out a landing page - there are all kinds of options.
In these cases, it makes perfect sense to track your click-throughs and try to maximise them.
However, I often see people take this thinking one step too far, and obsess over click-throughs on everything they send. But not everything you send is going to have a specific enough objective to make this worth doing!
If you're sending something that is just designed to keep your organisation top of mind (like this newsletter), then your click-through rate doesn't really matter. You might have a few links strewn through the content, but they aren't the reason that content exists.
So pay attention to click-throughs, but only if they are connected to the objective of the email. Otherwise, they're just an interesting metric.
That's it! Have a look at your existing email marketing with these things in mind, and let me know how you go.
See you
Sam
PS: We're in the December home stretch here in SG Towers, but you might be able to sneak in a copy review this side of Christmas if you book soon. $799 - book now.
PPS: If you want a free, public mini-home page review, send me a link to your home page. I'll do a two minute video and post it all over the place (including to your inbox). It won't be anywhere near as in depth or useful as a proper one, but it's better than nothing.
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