You’ve created, tested, and sent your first campaign. High five! Now’s when we get to talk about the value of your email marketing efforts and how it can be measured. The data collected in your Mailchimp reports will help you refine your marketing strategy going forward.
Opens and clicks
These are the most obvious statistics for measuring campaign engagement, as they indicate how well your subject lines and campaign content resonates with a particular list. But it’s important to consider how your open and click rates compare to other companies in your industry—otherwise you’re looking at your statistics in a vacuum. Our data science team has calculated some average email marketing statistics—open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, abuse rate, soft bounces, hard bounces—based on industry and company size so you can see how your company’s statistics compare.
Once you know where you stand in terms of campaign performance for your industry, you can start taking steps to improve opens and clicks with tools like A/B Testing. Low open rates, for example, could indicate that your subject lines aren’t enticing people to open your campaigns. Follow our tips for writing an effective subject line to come up with a few variations, then run an A/B test to see which one gets the most opens.
You might also need to narrow down your audience by sending a campaign to a targeted segment, or change how often you send. And to improve your click rates, consider using more descriptive link text. “Click here” tells your subscribers nothing about where a link in your campaign will take them.
E-commerce data
If you’ve connected your store to Mailchimp and turned on e-commerce link tracking for your campaigns, you can view purchase data for your subscribers in campaign reports, subscriber profiles, and on the account dashboard. Your reports will show you how much money your campaigns and automations make, as well as total orders and their average revenue.
Use your campaign reports to identify trends and create segments to find customers who purchased a specific product or spent a certain amount of money, then visit those customers’ subscriber profiles to see their full order history.
Website traffic
The campaigns you send can help you direct more traffic to your website or online store. And there are a few integrations you can sync with Mailchimp so you can track any trends in website traffic or e-commerce activity after you send a campaign.
If you use Google Analytics, you can add tracking to your campaigns to pass Google data to your campaign reports, or use conversion tracking in Google Analytics to track subscribers who click a link in your campaign all the way through to a purchase.
Our Connected Sites feature allows you to track subscriber activity from your campaigns to your website. You can create segments from this data, trigger an automation, and even set up a product retargeting email that gives you the power to send a message to a customer who has navigated to or away from a page on your website.
Check out how Mailchimp's free email marketing tools compare to the competition.
Email marketing FAQs
Here are the answers to some frequently asked questions that many businesses who are new to email marketing may have.
How can I build and grow my email marketing list?
You might hear that buying email lists is a good idea, but it actually isn't. A majority of the people on these lists have no idea who your company is, and it might annoy them to receive spam from you. A better way is to attract prospective subscribers to your website and encourage them to sign up for your newsletter or other free materials.
Why is email marketing important?
There are many benefits of email marketing. First of all, this type of marketing can be a great way to build relationships with your customers. Some other benefits of email marketing are:
- Businesses can reach customers worldwide, regardless of their proximity
- Cost-effective
- Your hours can be what you make them, as email can be sent 24/7
- You can take advantage of the many social networking platforms that currently exist
What are some of the different types of email marketing?
There are different types of email marketing, and here are 5 types that are commonly used:
- Welcome emails. These enable you to make initial contact with your subscribers, so they can get to know you and what your business is all about.
- Educational emails. The more educated your subscribers are about what you have to offer, the more likely they will be to purchase your products or services.
- Promotional emails. Everyone wants to feel as if they're getting a good deal on something, which is why promotional emails can dramatically increase sales.
- Reengagement emails. If your subscribers are in need of "nudging" because they have failed to show further interest, then these types of emails can be very effective.
- Newsletters. Many businesses underestimate the importance of providing newsletters for their subscribers, because it keeps them up-to-date with what's going on with your company, familiarizing them with your brand, and more.