In addition to evaluating our blog traffic and content, we’ve taken the time to evaluate the effectiveness of our email marketing. Measuring the success of your email marketing campaigns is important to understanding if the strategy you’re currently using is effective.
Specifically we wanted to focus on our email open rates and click through rates.
Open Rate = Emails Opened/ (Emails Sent – Bounces)
Open rate is the percentage of recipients who opened and looked at an email. Here’s more information on the best days for marketing email opens.
Click Through Rate = Total Number of Clicks/Emails Delivered
Click-through rate is the proportion of subscribers who clicked on one or more links within an email. Here’s more information on the best days for marketing email click-throughs.
Shining Moments of 2014
Our best received emails of 2014 in terms of open rate:
Major Logo Redesigns of 2013 Emails Sent: 503 Open Rate: 35.4%
Why do Hackers Hack? Emails Sent: 512: Open Rate: 27.7%
Why I’m Not Going to Sell You a Website Emails Sent: 459 Open Rate: 26.6%
Untangling Communication With Your Designer Emails Sent: 499 Open Rate: 24.8%
Have you met Val? Emails Sent: 456 Open Rate: 24.6%
Our best received emails of 2014 based on click-through rate:
Major Logo Redesigns of 2014 Emails Sent: 503 Click-Through Rate: 9.9%
Why do Hackers Hack? Emails Sent: 512 Click-Through Rate: 8.6%
Untangling Communication With Your Designer Emails Sent:499 Click-Through Rate: 5.4%
7 Things Every Trade Show Booth Needs Emails Sent: 469 Click-Through Rate: 5.3%
10 Design Trends to Enhance Your New Website Emails Sent: 489 Click-Through Rate: 4.9%
Considering that the marketing emails regarding our blog posts for Major Logo Redesigns of 2013, Why do Hackers Hack? and Untangling Communication With Your Designers each placed in our top 5 best marketing emails in terms of open rate and click through rate, these three emails were truly a success!
Email Marketing Averages
MayeCreate offers clients creative services in web and print design.
In 2013, our average email open rate was 19.71% and our average click-through rate was 2.57%.
Evaluating our marketing emails for first quarter 2014, our reports showed that we were averaging a 19.33% open rate and a 3.12% click-through rate.
According to the MailChip Email Marketing Benchmarks, we are meeting the industry average rates this year. Businesses in the creative services/agency industry average an open rate of 23.65% and a click-through rate of 3.36%. Businesses in the marketing and advertising industry average an open rate of 18.81% and a click-through rate of 2.44%. Our stats fell right in-between those benchmarks.
When comparing our email marketing averages, we know that our open rate has decreased ever so slightly from 2013 to 2014. On the other had, our click through rate has slightly increased. These changes can be partly attributed to a shift in our email marketing style.
MayeCreate Email Marketing Style
In 2013, we sent out marketing emails in the style of monthly newsletters. Each newsletter contained multiple blog post topics for subscribers to explore. With this style, blog subscribers only received one marketing email per month.
For 2014, we switched our method so that each marketing email only includes one blog post topic. As part of our new marketing strategy, we’ve decided to send out marketing emails (focused on a single topic) 3 times per week on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays in the mornings to our subscribers.
So even though we have fairly steady rates meeting the industry averages, we still want to do better and improve our marketing performance. We would like to know how our blog subscribers feel about the changes we’ve made to our email marketing style. By taking a few seconds to answer the questions in the survey below, we will be able to help you receive information how you want it, when you want it, and also help ourselves continue to improve our email marketing performance.
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