Email Marketing Guide: Email Types, Performance Indicators, Service Overview

[CarderPlanet]

Email newsletters are one of the classic and proven marketing tools that can help you stay in touch with your customers and increase sales. In addition, mailing lists lead among other channels in terms of return on investment. On average, for every dollar spent, email campaigns generate $ 42.

In this article, we will tell you why a business needs this tool and how its effectiveness is measured. We will also break down the types of email campaigns and look at several services that will simplify the work with email campaigns.

What is a newsletter, and why does a business need it​

Email newsletter is the sending of emails to a database of specific addressees. If the mailing of letters works successfully, then it helps the business to increase conversion and income, and to customers - to receive useful information or buy the desired product.

What you can use email marketing for:

• build long-term relationships with clients
• increase brand awareness
• generate leads
• promote goods and services
• promote useful content and build an image of an expert

Types of mailing lists​

There are several types of email marketing, depending on the purpose:

• information
• transactional
• trigger
• promo mailings
• reactivation

The same types of letters can be grouped according to the mechanics of sending. There are two types of emails, depending on how the letters are sent: automatic and manual.

Automatic. You set up the template once, set the conditions, and then the program for sending letters sends them on its own without your participation. This category includes transactional, trigger, reactivation.

Manual. For each letter, new content is being prepared, the mailing is done by an employee of the company in a separate database. This includes commercial, informational, and sometimes reactivation.

Let's now take a closer look at each category of email newsletters.

Information​

Why do we need
Share useful information with the audience, build the image of an expert in the eyes of the client. This type of mailing will increase brand awareness, build a loyal community around it; increase traffic to the site.

What to send

• Digest. For example, if a company maintains a corporate blog, you can collect several publications in one letter and share them with subscribers. To get the subscriber interested and go to the blog, add a short description to each link, tell them why the text is worth reading.
• Longread. In fact, this is a full-fledged article / review / interview, but in the form of an email. In the case of such emails, you need to work well with both the content itself and the layout, because long texts are difficult to read and understand.

To make things easier for the reader, it is important to write a clear heading and subheadings - with a cursory reading, they should add up to a single story. In addition, where appropriate - structure information into lists, add infographics, images.

When to send
To prevent the reader from immediately adding such mailings to spam, it is better to start small and increase the frequency if there is a good response. To get started, it is enough to send newsletters once a month. It is good to alternate them with commercial, or combine these two types: to organically embed the mention of the brand / product in the text.

What not to add: sales pitch, overly obvious advertisements.

Transactional​

A transactional mailing is an automated chain of letters. The system sends each letter after a specific action. This applies to both actions on the part of the client and actions on the part of the business.

To build an effective transactional email chain, you need to look at the customer journey on your site. Examine what key events happen to the visitor, and write a letter for each scenario.

Why do we need

• let the client know that his action has received a response;
• notify when the result will be and what exactly;
• tell you what to do next.

When to send
Following the event: registration, purchase, subscription / unsubscription, password change, number / mail confirmation, delivery of goods, etc.

What to send
Here the content of the letter depends on the trigger itself, for example:

• registration - a welcome letter;
• email confirmation letter;
• purchase - a confirmation letter with the order number and a list of purchased goods;
• delivery - a message stating that the goods have been sent, with the invoice number and the expected delivery date.

Trigger​

Why do we need
The task of a trigger letter is to get the client to take some action. They are used to additionally motivate, resell, remind of an unfinished purchase.

Trigger letters are also classified as automatic. You set conditions for sending - triggers - and when the customer's behavior meets the condition, the newsletter service sends him the desired message.

When to send
Each hotel business will have its own set of triggers. It all depends on the product, scenarios of its use and how detailed you track and analyze the activity of your customers.

Here are some common triggers:

• abandoned cart: the customer added an item to the cart, but did not pay;
• after a successful purchase: offer the customer similar products or those that he viewed / added to the cart, but decided not to buy;
• if the user is not active: registered, but does nothing further;
• used the service regularly, and then suddenly stopped.

Promotional mailings​

Why do we need

Tell that the company has a lucrative offer for customers, additionally motivate and motivate them to purchase.

What to send
Information about promotions, special offers, seasonal discounts, new products and services.

When to send: when there is a relevant newsfeed.

Reactivation​

Why do we need

• Engage and return subscribers who have stopped opening and reading your emails.
• Clear the database from inactive addresses. Uninterested people can add emails to spam or unsubscribe, and this will ruin the reputation of your mail domain.

What are we sending
In a reactivation letter, you can write the following:

• Ask if subscribers want to receive your letters: we say that this is the last letter and ask them to answer whether they want to receive letters further or not.
• Give a benefit: Remind about yourself and send a discount or special offer.
• Remind the subscriber that they can edit their email preferences and link to the settings page.

It is important to add a catchy topic in order to maximize the interest of the user - here different methods are used - to joke, immediately offer benefits, press on pity, play on fears, catch the reader by surprise.

Here are some examples of topics:

• "It seems to be goodbye. How did it happen?" - to put pressure on pity.
• "Your coupon will burn out today" - benefit + fear of missed opportunity.
• "We have an anniversary with you - 10 unread letters. We give a gift for this!" - humor + benefit.
• "We started to worry about you. Is everything all right?" - to be taken by surprise with an unexpected question.

When to send: if the subscriber does not respond to your emails for several months.

How to send a newsletter by mail: the main stages of preparing an email campaign​

1. Be clear about your audience and goals
You must understand who you want to send letters to and what result you expect from this.

2. Select the type of email campaign
Once you understand what the effect of a campaign should be, it is easy to decide which type of email campaign is right for you. For example, more blog readers are informational; to automate the process of customer onboarding is transactional trigger.

3. Develop the text

The standard email structure is as follows:

• Topic
• Preheader: The text that appears after the subject line of the email. The recipient sees it even before opening the letter itself.
• Header (header): this is the first thing that the addressee sees when deciding to read the mailing list. The header contains a logo, slogan, links to social networks or popular product categories (served as a website menu). In order for all these elements to look harmonious and the design style of the header, it is better to entrust a professional.
• Body text: if the letter is long, break the body text into meaningful blocks and give each block its own subheading.
• Call to action (CTA) + button: are in the same block of meaning. STA makes it clear exactly what the client should do by reading the letter. And the button leads to action.
• Footer (footer): add the "Unsubscribe" button, address, phone number, social networks, links to the site or its individual pages here.

4. Prepare a list of recipients
Use only the base that you have developed yourself.

Segment your audience to send subscribers only the content that is most relevant to them.

5. Schedule a shipment
GetResponse statistics show that most emails are opened at 10 am, 1 pm, and around 6 pm. Note that here we are talking about manually sending letters. Emails, of course, will automatically leave in response to a user's action, regardless of the time.

6. Measure the results
Use clear KPIs to understand whether the newsletter has achieved the desired goal or not. We will talk about the main metrics in the next section.

Email campaign performance metrics​

Email marketers use about 20 metrics to measure how successful an email campaign was. We will focus on five main indicators - open rate, conversion, CTR, bounce rate. They will help you quickly assess whether your mailing list is working as expected.

Open rate: the rate of openings​

This metric makes it clear what percentage of recipients opened the message.

Formula:
(open letters / (sent - letters with a delivery error)) х 100%

Email programs calculate this indicator automatically. On average, an open rate of 20% is considered the norm. But it is not worth chasing this interest very much for two reasons.

1. The rate of openings is highly dependent on the scope of the company.
For example, letters from government services and structures had a 30.5% open rate, while food and beverage companies had 13%. And this is understandable: messages from the state seem to be more important than, say, mailing about an updated menu. More interesting data can be found in the report from the Campaign Monitor service.

2. The coefficient is not always accurate.
To understand whether an email has been opened or not, postal services add a beacon to each letter - an image with a unique identifier. The addressee opened the mailing list, the picture was loaded - the program registered that the letter was read. But if the recipient has enabled image blocking in letters, then the open letter will not be counted.

How to use this metric in practice
Open rates can give some insight when you compare data within the same audience. So, based on the percentage of the open rate, you can draw conclusions which subject of the letter most of all clings to a certain segment of users, and which techniques work worse.

How to increase the open rate

• The subject line plays a major role here, so test and analyze different options and techniques. For example, having the recipient's name in the subject line increases the open rate by 26%. Check if this works for you.
• Update the email list so that only valid email addresses remain.
• Conduct reactivation mailings to interest and return inactive subscribers.

Click-through rate (CTR): clickability​

Shows the percentage of recipients who clicked on one or more links from the email. If the CTR of your mailing is 2.6% or higher, you can assume that the campaign has worked effectively.

Formula:
(number of clicks / number of delivered emails) х 100%

How to use this metric in practice
The conversion rate makes it clear how the audience is interested in the content of the mailing list. It is useful to track it over time: this way you can identify the most engaging content. Also, CTR is the first metric to look out for if you're doing A / B testing.

How to increase the CTR

• Use verbs in the call to action and on the button - learn, buy, read and the like.
• Make sure the email is mobile-readable and that links and buttons are easy to access on a small screen.
• Make pictures clickable.
• Analyze how recipients interact with content so that only what is relevant to your customers is sent to your customers.

Conversion Rate: conversion​

Shows the percentage of recipients who followed the link from the letter and performed the targeted action - bought a product, filled out a contact form, watched a video, and renewed a subscription.

Calculated by the formula:

(number of targeted actions completed / letters delivered) х 100%

To understand whether the recipient of the newsletter has performed the target action, you need to monitor his behavior after going to the site. Help with this UTM-tags - a unique text identifier at the end of the link. You can create a link with a UTM tag, for example, using the Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder. Then you just need to add a link to the letter, and then look at the results of the transitions in the Google Analytics dashboard.

Unsubscribe rate: rate of unsubscribe​

The percentage of people who decided to unsubscribe from your mailing list.

Formula:
(number of unsubscribed / number of delivered emails) х 100%

This ratio should not exceed 1%. But, as a percentage of discoveries, this metric does not give a 100% idea of the real state of affairs. For example, a client is tired of your emails, but hasn't unsubscribed. I just stopped opening them, reading them and following the links. It's useful to check this metric once a month to see if your subscriber list is growing or not.

How to reduce the likelihood of unsubscribing

• Do not overuse advertising and sales letters.
• Give recipients the ability to choose how often and what types of emails they want to receive. This can be done in the subscription form itself or in your personal account.

Bounce Rate: the bounce rate​

Shows what percentage of letters were not delivered to recipients. Distinguish between "soft" and "hard" returns. The first are temporary problems with the delivery of the letter, for example, because the recipient's mailbox is full. "Hard" bounces - the letter cannot be delivered in principle, because such an address does not exist or the email has become inactive.

Formula:
(number of undelivered emails / per number of emails sent) х 100%

The ratio should be no higher than 2%, otherwise it will affect the sender's reputation, and mailing may automatically go to spam.

How to reduce the bounce rate

• Build a database of good quality : do not buy a database of email addresses; sends letters only to those users who have agreed to receive the newsletter.
• Clean up the list of addresses from irrelevant emails: after reactivation campaigns or when notifications come that an email has not been delivered.
• Do not use free domains like gmail or yandex for bulk mailings.

Overview of services for sending letters​

Let's take a look at three popular email marketing programs - MailChimp, Sendpulse, eSputnik.

MailChimp​

Opportunities:

• free version with good functionality;
• 4 types of campaigns: standard, plain text, A / B testing, automated email threads;
• integration with social networks, CMS, SaaS platforms: MailChimp has a large database of additional services and applications;
• more than 100 ready-made design templates: divided into thematic categories;
• strong basic and advanced analytics;
• the ability to customize the subscription / unsubscribe forms.

Price
Paid version starts at $ 9.99 for 500 contacts, Essentials plan. In total, the service has 3 paid packages , the price within each plan increases depending on the size of the base. The service offers a cost calculator.

The free version provides the following features: sending up to 2,000 contacts in the database; 10,000 letters per month; a set of ready-made letter templates, automation, basic reporting, built-in polls. For bloggers, freelancers, small and even medium-sized businesses, these options may be enough.

Transmit pulses​

Opportunities:

• multichannel: not only email newsletters, but sms / Viber mailings, push notifications;
• 4 categories of email templates: basic, news, plain text, for an online store;
• sending emails via SMTP server: standalone solution for transactional email campaigns, 12,000 per month can be sent free of charge;
• A / B testing and automation.

Price
The tariff for the paid version is from 6.4 dollars, it assumes mailing to a base of 500 addresses.

Free version: up to 500 subscribers, up to 15,000 emails per month, ready-made templates, minimal automation (up to 5 triggers), you can add push notifications to auto-mails.

eSputnik​

Opportunities:

• ready-made solutions for small and large businesses;
• strong analytics: reports on manual and automatic campaigns can be viewed separately;
• dynamics of base changes;
• segmentation: one of the strengths of the service is its many characteristics to create a variety of conditions for segmenting the base;
• a separate focus on solutions for online stores;
• multichannel.

Price
There are two types of tariffs - "Free" and "Optimal". In the first, you pay for the number of letters sent, the number of recipients is not limited. For example, 1000 letters cost 1.73 euros. In the second, billing is based on the size of the base: the more subscribers, the more expensive the mailing list. For example, for sending any number of emails to 1000 contacts - 5 euros / month.

Free version: database of up to 500 contacts, unlimited number of letters. Test period: 2500 trial emails and 10 SMS.

Programs for sending letters that were not included in the survey, but are also widely used by businesses - Campaign Monitor, Unisender, GetResponse.

At Interkassa we use the MailChimp service. Through it we send promotional mailings, as well as informational digests with useful information for online entrepreneurs. If you also want to receive our digest - subscribe to the newsletter through the form at the end of this page.