Thanks to the annual email marketing benchmarking study by Silverpop, we got some great takeaways on open rates, click-through rates, and list churn.
Let’s keep it simple and quickly touch on the top 5 takeaways as it relates to click through rates:
- Just as with unique open rates - APAC outperformed the rest for click through rates.
That’s an interesting statistic but doesn’t mean much to you, but the below tips should:
Things to remember about click through metrics:
- It’s a more accurate metric than open rates, but it should not be substituted for output goals.
- Computer Hardware & Telecommunications, Consumer Products, and Lodging, Travel Agencies & Services outpaced the others in click through rates by industry.
So - what? What might attribute this win for Computer Hardware and Transportation? It’s likely due to the robust content marketing done by this industry. They dominate with research, white papers, and often lean heavily on providing industry insights and content that people want to reference and save for later. It’s a long term relationship building tactic couched heavily in content.
- Transactional e-mails absolutely kill vs. non-transactional e-mails...again.
As I mentioned in a previous post, this has direct implications for you. Be sure that transactional e-mails dominate your email strategy. In other words, craft email campaigns based on the the actions taken by your users or potential users. Whatever you chose to call them ‘triggered,” “automatic,” “personalized” or even “real-time,” e-mails should be sent based on actions and interactions people have with your product, content or advertising.
Here are a few tips to optimize your transactional emails:
- Think about where the customer is in their journey. Tailor additional value added messages or offers inside of basic transactional emails. For example, in a confirmation e-mail, offer an opt-in for a subscription to a newsletter, recommend a complimentary product, or take the opportunity to ask for feedback. Many transactional emails are “expected” meaning, the user expects communication after they’ve taken a certain action. Capitalize on their engagement, but be sure whatever you are offering is genuinely useful to the recipient.
- Keep transactional e-mails customer focused by always including contact info - and ensure it’s easy to locate.
- Stay on brand. Even if you’re a small business or start up, there are easy ways to continue to represent the brand in the e-mail keeping in the tone, colors, and assets used on the website.
- Be sure your emails are mobile optimized.
- APAC wins again with the most clicks/clicker
Clicks per clicker is a measurement of the number of links clicked or how many times a particular link was clicked, inside of one e-mail.
Silverpop points out that most marketers expected to see clicks per clicker drop as mobile became increasingly the device of choice. It’s interesting to point out that in fact, the opposite has happened.
A few things I think could be happening here. One being marketers anticipated this change in user behavior and have been creating e-mails that are more tightly tailored to the minimal real estate of a mobile screen, minimizing calls to action, and other ‘noise’ both in messaging and design. Secondly, it might be that the mobile experience, the device itself, lends itself to quicker interaction, with less obstacles to click with mobile being a touch screen, users might feel less encumbered to click on links.
- Computer Hardware and Corporate Services dominated the clicker per clicker by industry.
As I mentioned in a previous post, as a marketer, this signifies that people are engaging with content that has long term relevance to them. They like things they can reference later, like best practices, white papers, user tips, industry statistics etc.