Your email list is incredibly valuable! In addition to giving you the ability to connect directly with the people on that list, sending emails to that list can give you important information about your contacts.
Here are 3 things you can learn when you send email to your list of customers and prospects:
- Who opened your email… and who didn’t?
When you monitor your email open rate, you learn who is – and who is not – opening your email. This can tell you whether your email is of interest to your recipients when they see it in their inbox.
Whether or not a particular recipient decides to open your email is influenced by a number of different factors including what you used for a subject line, when you sent the email, and who they see that it is from. Therefore, it’s best to monitor your open rates across multiple emails sent over time rather than judging based on just one email, and to try a few different strategies to see what works best for you.
- Who is interested in your content… and who isn’t?
By monitoring your click rate, you can see how many people who received your email are clicking on the call-to-action that you present to them. They may have clicked to read the rest of an article, to see details about an event that you’ve promoted, or to learn more about a special offer. This can tell you if they’re interested in your content and what you have to offer.
Whether or not they click depends completely on the content you provide so take note: In order to generate useful click-rates, you must first give your readers something to click on! To do this, provide only the introduction or opening excerpt of your article or offer, and then a link to the web page where they’ll find the full article or details of your offer.
- Who is not receiving your email?
Email is almost 40% more effective than social media in helping you acquire customers (McKinsey). That being said, just because you hit “send” doesn’t mean that the people on your list will actually receive your email.
It’s important to monitor your bounce rate and make sure the email is actually getting to their inbox! After you sent the message out, go back and see what addresses bounced and why. This is your opportunity to correct any misspellings and resend your email, and to delete any nonexistent emails.
Why is this important? First and foremost, this is how you confirm that your email actually got out to the intended recipient. It confirms that you have the right email addresses, it keeps your email list clean, and it gives your message the best chance of being received. Also, any bounced emails register as unopened which negatively skews your open rate.
These are just three different things that you can learn from your email list, and they just scratch the surface. There is so much more, especially if you send emails out regularly. So take the time to measure and monitor your email, and see what you can learn from it!
