A new report from Clutch reveals some of the best practices of successful email marketers, as well as where some marketers’ efforts are falling short.
The survey, which included more than 300 email marketers working at both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies with more than 100 employees, found that newsletters are the most common email sent, outranking standalone, lead nurturing, and transactional messages.
The report shows that most marketers agree on when to send emails, with the majority opting for Monday and Friday – between 9 and 11 AM. They also generally agree that personalization is key, and 82% consider themselves “Expert” or “Advanced” in their ability to personalize their messaging.
Marketers Disagree on Which Metrics to Track
Where marketers tend to differ is on the topic of tracking results. As seen in the chart below, subscriber list growth had a slight edge, with 25% of marketers citing it as being one of their top three most important metrics.
This finding reflects one of the most common challenges in email marketing: deciding which metrics to track and how to determine success.
Top email marketers generally agree that it’s far more important to track metrics that reflect how people actually engage with messages. Depending on an organization’s goals, those metrics may include click-through rate, open rate, audience engagement, or conversions.
Yet, many marketers are gauging their success based on the size of their subscriber lists. While having thousands of subscribers might make a marketer feel good or seem impressive to higher ups in the organization, list size actually has relatively little impact on a company’s larger business objectives.
Focus Less on List Size
Having a huge list that never opens your emails or never clicks on your links doesn’t exactly help you reach your marketing goals. And, what’s worse, a large list that doesn’t care what you have to say can actually hurt your email efforts.
For example, sending messages to expired email addresses or inactive subscribers can result in bounces that will hurt your email deliverability and get your emails caught in spam filters. If that happens, even the people on your list who do want to hear from you, may not get your messages.
A better option is to stay on top of your email lists and attempt to either re-engage or remove inactive subscribers. It’s far better to have a smaller list of active, engaged users than a massive unengaged list.
What to Track Instead
Clutch’s report highlights the best practices of successful email marketers, including Community.is from Loyal, Ceros, and 730DC. These case studies reveal that a successful email marketing strategy will focus on metrics related to audience engagement, not list growth.
As Brad Hess, Director of Demand Generation at Ceros puts it: “At the end of the day, I don’t want a list of 100 people who are never going to open any of my emails because they were forced to subscribe. I want to find someone who has opted-in because they saw the content was valuable.”
Focus email marketing efforts on providing true value for subscribers, and track the metrics that reflect that value. From there, list growth, and more important, meeting your business objectives, will follow.