First of all, you need to:

1. Set your objectives/goals and make sure they’re measurable. For example:

Generate more sales by:

• Converting customers to prospects by xx%
• Upsell and cross-sell to existing customers by xx%

Increase brand engagement/set yourself as a thought-leader in the industry by:

• Improving your content share via social links by xx%
• Improving your content share via forward to a friend links by xx%

Grow your customer intelligence by:

• Having a set of criteria you want to learn about them, directly from them. i.e. through surveys and forms
• Having a set of criteria you want to learn about them, by using advanced features that are part of your email platform and 3^rd party tools that integrate with your ESP

2. Decide what metrics you are going to measure

We suggest starting off with the 7 basic stats

• Open rates, clicks, click-to-open and share rate 
• Delivery rates, bounce rates and net list growth 
• And then look into 6 alternative metrics which we’ll be covering in our ‘Metrics Matter: Beyond the essentials’ guide, which will be published end of April

3. Decide what you’re going to compare/benchmark yourself against

• This could be the best email stats compiled by an industry expert. Check out Dave Chaffey’s article on email marketing statistics 2015
• Doing your own industry or competitor analysis
• Benchmarking against your own email marketing strategy by comparing date ranges. New functionality in dotmailer makes this easy peasy for you to do, like no other ESP

Now take these steps:

1. Use the data you already have to segment your lists (a little segmentation is better than nothing)

• Industry
• Gender
• Location
• Date of birth
• Customer type

2. Use the data you have to personalize your emails as much as possible

• According to Marketing Land who cites research by Experian, a personalized email will lift transaction rates and revenue per email six times higher than non-personalized emails.

3. Collect more data to improve your segmentation rules. For example:

• Email sign up forms
• Website pop-overs
• Customer satisfaction surveys
• Competitions
• Preference center
• Dotdigital insights – use WebInsight  & SocialInsight to learn more about your contact’s engagement and behavior with your website and social influence and Orderinisght to collect their transactional data

4. Use that data for advanced personalization and dynamic content to create engaging and targeted content

• Econsultancy’s Daily Pulse which uses dynamic content based on user preferences

• Boots bringing in your personal points information

5. Use your email marketing reports to build a picture of what makes your customers tick

• What are your best performing subject lines? Check out our latest blog on how you can build that winning subject line using your detailed reporting data
• Which email content categories get the most opens, clicks and conversions?
• What content is getting the most clicks? By grouping your links by topic you can find that out in no time

6. Test and try different things

• But plan what you’ll test, how much and for how long. Don’t test too many things at one time

7. Use a preference center – give your customers a choice of what they want to receive and how frequently

• Marks and Spencer preference center

8. Automate it

Make a list of all your comms and decide what can be automated. Start off with the easiest things like an automated welcome email, website driven engagement (like a whitepaper download) and anniversary based emails etc.

• Boots welcome email

• A Happy Birthday Message from Avon

Then build your way up so you start automating emails like win back, browse/cart abandonment and product replenishment programs.

• Starbucks lapsed customers

• Alexandalexa browse abandonment

• Science in Sport cart abandonment

• Nutrica product replenishment program

It’s good to get to a stage where a good chunk of your comms can be automated so you can spend more time focusing on important solus emails and your email marketing strategy. Free up your time to analyze the results (refer back to your initial goals etc.) and make those all important changes to improve your email marketing strategy performance and ROI.

And that brings us to the end of this blog post – we hope you’ve found it useful. If you want to find out how we can help with your email marketing strategy, please don’t hesitate to get in touch! 

Delivery rates

As mentioned in our previous blog, according to Econsultancy, 68% of today’s marketers see email’s ROI as excellent or good – higher than any other channel. So the importance of making sure your email is delivered to your recipient’s inbox is pretty high.  Most email platforms will show you very clearly what your delivery rate is for every email you send. And most ESPs will have processes put in place to help their clients maximize their delivery rates.

And don’t forget to use an ESP who has a good reputation!

Most companies will check their deliverability rates but it’s important that you do it over time to help you spot trends and by email campaign so you can track relationships between bounce activity and engagement. This takes us nicely on to our next metric, bounce rates.

Bounce rates

High bounce rates aren’t good. If yours are high it can result in your sending address and server being blocked for spamming. Thankfully, most ESPs will prevent this from happening by telling you if your bounces are soft (email delivery was unsuccessful but email address is valid) or hard (invalid email address) and then removing them accordingly from your account so you don’t send to them again.

But to prevent hard bounces in the first place, here are some precautionary steps you can take:

• Clean your lists. Look out for incorrect formatted email addresses and don’t put them in your account. Most ESPs will have a way of automating this process so you don’t have to worry about it
• Double opt-in. Get your customers to verify their opt-in and email address to avoid bad data sneaking through
• Have a preference center link in your emails so your customers can update their email address
• Make your unsubscribe link easy to find and make it easy to complete. You’d rather they unsubscribe than make an ISP complaint right?

To keep safe, don’t use the same domain as your website for your send address. If your website happens to get blacklisted you don’t want it to affect your email marketing.

Net list growth

Net list growth is knowing the number of new subscribers acquired minus the number lost through unsubscribes or hard bounces. This is crucially important to keeping your audience list refreshed.  You can easily track your unsubscribes and bounces as discussed above and here’s some tips on how to grow and refresh your list:

• Online surveys
• Website newsletter signups
• Triggered ‘thank you’ emails that request more data
• Social media – capture your Facebook visitors data and Twitter followers.
• Capture your blog visitors data
• Competitions
• Exchange something of value to your audience for rich data
• Google adwords built-in contact form

We hope this two part blog series has given you some guidance that you can use when looking at your email marketing reports. And because tracking and reporting on your email marketing isn’t always as straightforward, we’re also publishing a paper ‘Metrics Matter – Beyond The Essentials’ that looks at 6 alternative metrics that you might not have thought about before but are increasingly being considered. Keep an eye on our resources page for it.

Let’s start by explaining exactly what a plain-text email is in comparison to its glamorous counterpart, the HTML.

Plain-text emails are essentially emails that are annulled of any formatting and are readable as just text. When you compose a plain-text email you can’t bold text, you can’t underline certain words and you can’t even change colours or font sizes. A plain-text is the plain Jane of email marketing. I guess the clue’s in the name really.

So, why would a marketer choose to send a plain-text alongside or instead of an HTML version?

HTML (which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language) is the way webpages are encoded to be able to display bold, italics and colour. While they can indeed be used to create lovely looking branded sends, they’re not much use if the email client you’re sending or the device  receiving your email can’t display it properly. Visually there’s no contest, the HTML wins every time! So is there a place for plain texts?

Yes, and here’s the case for plain text email! 

• Whereas HTMLs can display differently from client to client, with plain-texts you know your recipients will see exactly what you see.
• HTML’s look more like personal messages, like one that you’d send to a colleague or a friend. It’s certainly worth trying a plain-text send to see if it affects your engagement statistics in any way. Remembering that with no images to download it may not increase your opens. As suggested by the DMA in the ‘Open Reach’ discussion paper – look at overall engagement instead.
• With plain-texts, the focus is on the content not the design. Yes HTML provides the eye candy, but is that what your subscribers really want? Again, it’s worth testing.

And that’s not all:

• Plain-text emails always work on mobile devices. Even in our day and age some mobiles remove the fancy HTML images. As a result your emails might not appear quite as you designed them. Your text (without the images) might appear a little skew-whiff (BlackBerrys are prone to this). Marketers who want to play it safe should create a plain-text back up message for every campaign they send.
• Despite the fact that most platforms now support HTML, plain text email still has its place in terms of deliverability. Make sure that your plain text email matches your HTML version as closely as possible. Spam filters compare your plain-text  to your HTML email. If only a small proportion of your HTML message is in your plain-text message, your email is going be treated like spam.

Think again about plain text emails

Hopefully you won’t go rushing to immediately ditch your mobile responsive, brand aligned template. Always make sure you have generated (and formatted) your plain text version as well so that your recipients without HTML-capable devices have some good content to view. Although it won’t be for everyone, have a think about ways to test sending plain text emails only.

So, there you have it! the case for the plain text email. What do you think? We’d love to hear what your experience has been with plain texts in comparison to HTMLs. Leave a comment below. We’ll always reply! Or learn more here.