Snaptastic Blog

You’ve just hit send on that beautifully designed email and are confident that its journey through the World Wide Web will conclude in your customer’s inbox. And since your customer’s email inbox isn’t very populated, there’s a good chance they will open your email which will entice a visit to your store.

Unfortunately the reality of email marketing isn’t that simple. The good news is that it can be with just a few more steps that begin and end with your campaign reports. All email marketing software should have the capability to check the performance of your email campaigns including open rates, click rates, and deliveries. If you’re a SnapRetail subscriber you can find your campaign reports from the “Reports” tab above your login screen. You can learn a lot about your subscriber list by checking the performance of your email campaigns.

What do these numbers mean?

Now that you are aware of the importance of email reporting you’re most likely curious of the meaning behind these stats. Let’s start with open rates.

Open rates are the percentage of your list that has received and opened your message. The remainder percentage accounts for those that have deleted your email or simply left the message in their inbox without opening. Evaluating open rates against the type of message and subject line you are creating will give you valuable insight on what your customers like to see. If you realize that every time you send an email with “Malden Frames” in the subject line you receive a 3% higher open rate, then you know your customers love to shop for Malden Frames and can assume other promotional messages around photo frames may pique their interest. If the word “sale” causes a dip in open rates then you may not want to use that word in future campaigns for your customers may think of it as too “salesy” and become turned off by it. Be sure to keep an eye on open rates for an entire week after the email is sent. Some customers do not check their emails every day and may receive the message later than expected.

You can derive more information about the call to action (CTA) of your campaign with the evaluation of click through rates. Click through rates (CTRs) are the percentage of your email list that has clicked a certain link within your message. Click through rates are good for determining the effectiveness of a certain offer and/or promotion. If you included an offer in the bottom of your email and received a lower CTR than when the offer was displayed at the top of the email then your customers may lose interest in your message after skimming over the first few lines and/or images.

You can optimize future promotional offers by making the message the focus of your email.

Test, Send, Test, Send

Be sure to refrain from making any conclusions after one single test. If your campaign received a low open rate just because you included “sale” in the subject line does not mean you should never do that again. The performance of your email campaign can be determined by a number of aspects- subject line, call to action, products featured, promotion included, nature of layout, copy, etc… By taking the time to dive into these reports you’re already on your way to becoming an email marketing expert.