Email campaigns are often used as part of a marketing strategy. But how effective are they really? In this blog post we have looked at the hardcore data and analysed our own email campaign to determine our email newsletter effectiveness.
In August this year we have sent out our first email newsletter entitled: Moove + WordCamp = Love
We’ve sent it to our list of 538 subscribers and received some interesting stats.
We use MailChimp for our email campaigns and one of their many nice features is the comparison of our campaign against the industry standard results. As seen on the results above, we’ve achieved double the industry open rate and four times the industry click-through rate!
The reason why I think the numbers are so high are:
We didn’t use the help of a professional copywriter this time but would seriously consider it if our campaign was “words” driven instead of visually driven.
The unsubscribe rate is much higher than the industry standard. Although only 18 people unsubscribed, MailChimp already warned us that if this would repeat, they would block our account. No complaints made which makes me think of two conclusions:
Social media effect was quite low. No one forwarded our campaign nor liked it on Facebook or tweeted about it. I have to admit that the reasons for it must be that the campaign was not innovative or cutting edge enough. Oops. ?
The geographic reach of our campaign largely reflected the geographical position of our clients. The majority are UK based, followed by US clients and then comes the rest of the world. No surprises here.
Our Google analytics shows that our two important goals – Contact us page and Enquiries submitted has not been achieved. At least not directly (ie. in an easily trackable way). My reasoning for this is that the absolute majority of people on our email lists are our clients ie. someone who already worked with us or had direct contact with us.
If the goals that I measure are
a) user visiting contact us page (where he can either find our email or our telephone number)
b) user submitting enquiry using our contact us form
then the reasons for them not visiting these pages might be simply that
a) they have our contact details already or
b) they are not interested in our services currently
c) the contact details were featured at the bottom of the newsletter
A few clients complimented us on a nice newsletter but I have not tracked any new business emerging directly from this campaign yet.
MailChimp gives us an overview of which users in particular viewed the campaign most. That is a very useful information indeed as we could contact those users directly now if we wanted to.
Although the hard-code data did not show any enquiries, I am pleased with the “above industry” click through rate. I’m also a firm believer that we need to keep in touch with our clients & subscribers from time to time. A newsletter is one of the ways to do this. The effects may not be immediate, however, can occur later down the line when our clients or potential prospects will remember us for their next web or design project.
What about your email campaigns? How effective are they?
