When is the best day to send emails? How can you optimise your email marketing when competition is high and Mail Privacy Protection has resulted in unreliable open rates? A recent study on over 100 billion emails by the CM Group resulted in one of the most extensive email marketing benchmarks data document that’s ever been published.

Due to the effect of Mail Privacy Protection, it’s difficult to determine what a good open rate or click-through rate is for email. Recently Apple released a new privacy feature that has resulted in inflated open rates, caused by emails that are being marked as opened due to pre-fetching. It’s important for companies to watch out for this when marketing towards Apple users.

Although marketers may say that there is a specific day that’s best to send emails and optimise interactions, research shows that there is very little difference between email performances on a given day. However, weekdays tend to achieve the best performance, compared to weekends.

So what metrics should you be focusing on in order to improve customer interactions and loyalty, as well as sales? The first metric is improving your open rate. This is achieved by refining your subject lines, focusing on maximising previews with preheader text and providing relevant content through customisation and segmentation. Although MPP can make it difficult to determine the accuracy of open rates, it’s still an important metric.

Another important metric is improving your click-through rate (CTR). This metric provides important information as to how many of your subscribers are visiting your website. You can optimise these results by forming stronger audience segments to market towards, customise email templates, use a consistent brand voice, and provide greater incentives to gain your subscribers attention.

Click-to-open rate (CTOR) is another important metric that shows whether your email subscribers find your content interesting. By providing personalised emails with a unique copy and design, ensuring that emails will render clearly across all devices and incorporating easy-to-click call to actions. (CTAs).

While this may sound contradictory, improving your unsubscribe rate is another important metric. Subscribers that are unengaged are more likely to lower your email performance, therefore it’s better in the long run for your business to remove them from your contact lists. However, you should still try to still try to re-engage those subscribers and determine why they stopped interacting with your email content. 

Reducing your bounce rates is another vital metric to look out for. This can be achieved by steering clear of spam content, never using free webmail addresses, or sending to purchased email lists and consistently removing invalid email addresses from your contact lists.

Finally, don't forget to improve your deliverability rate. This metric can be a struggle to improve upon due to numerous issues from bouncing to bulking. However, there are a few practices you can implement to improve deliverability, such as making it easy for people to unsubscribe, using a double opt-in instead of single and avoiding sending from a no-reply email address, or including too many images.

When using these email marketing practices, your business should see significant improvements in consumer reach, engagement and loyalty.

Reference:

Sailthru. 2022. Email Marketing Benchmarks: Everything You Need to Know for 2022. Available at: https://www.sailthru.com/marketing-blog/email-marketing-benchmarks/?utm_source=emarketer&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=af-rpi-2022&utm_content=text-ad