Email Marketing is the most popular digital marketing channel used by bloggers and marketers in organizations small and large alike. In fact it is usually the part of every digital marketing plan a marketing team comes up with.
For a blogger, email marketing is one of the most important channels to promote your blog.
The reasons for this are:
- It is one of the simplest ways to start promoting your blog. It takes only a few minutes to start an email campaign with your favorite email program.
- It is one of the most cost-effective marketing channels. “Email marketing has an ROI of 3800% – Source DMA”
- Email marketing is one of the easiest channels which can be automated. This ensures minimal efforts are required to market your blog and services.
For a blogger who has just started a blog and is exploring ways to promote it, email marketing is an obvious choice. In this post we take a look at 3 critical email marketing matrices everyone most monitor and optimize for getting an improved performance on their email marketing efforts.
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Monitoring the below metrics and optimizing your email marketing basis insights from these can yield in a much better results on your marketing efforts.
Subscriber Count (The Top One Of Three Critical Email Marketing Matrices For A Blogger)
This is simply the count of your subscribers. This is one of the most critical matrix. Your blog subscriber count is directly proportional to how successful your blog is.
You should put your efforts in gaining more subscribers for your blog. You should develop a relationship with your blog subscribers by sending them useful resources.
You can gain more blog subscribers by following the below strategies.
- Add a Subscribe to your blog posts form at prominent places on your blog like the header, sidebar, between the content and in the footer. Here is an example:
- Add a Call To Action Button to your subscription form on your Facebook page. e.g.
- Add content upgrades in your blog post. It is a simple opt-in form or a lead magnet with a very tempting offer in exchange of a desired action like getting an e-mail address.
Open Rate (Master This To Master All Other Email Marketing Matrices)
Open rate is one major email marketing matrix basis which you can fairly judge if your subscribers find your emails interesting. Email open rates also give you good idea about the engagement levels of your subscribers.
Open rate optimization is an email marketing strategy you should definitely focus on to optimize your email campaign performance.
Open rate is calculated as a percentage of total emails opened to total emails delivered.
A few good strategies to improve email open rates are:
Subject Line Optimization
If you are able to get this done, you will have open rates beating industry standards.
You have to come up with 4-5 subject lines with 4 to 5 different intents but in line with what’s inside the email.
After doing this, you have to split your list into 4-5 sub segments and send them your email.
This is how you are A/B testing your subject lines against one another to get the best performing subject lines.
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Pro-Tip: “Adding a personalization element like “Recipient Name” in your subject line can improve its response by at least 20%”
Tools like campaign monitor, iContact and Mailchimp have simple features built-in the email marketing platforms to get this done with ease.
From Name Optimization
This is usually missed but is still critical to getting your email instantly recognized and in tandem with a good subject line helps in getting a good open rate on your emails.
From Name is the name using which an email is sent to a recipient. For a blogger, it can either be the blog name or the blogger name. For an organization/brand it can be the brand or organization name. Here is an example:
An A/B test can be performed on from lines as well, keeping all other elements constant to find out the best of lot.
Click Through Rate (The Final Result Yielding Email Marketing Matrix)
Click through rate is calculated as a percentage of clicks to emails opened. This matrix is a good judge of your content quality or how popular your offer inside the email is.
There are many factors responsible to get a good click-through on your emails.
- The recipient finds your email useful.
- You have to ensure that the call to action is clear. This means it’s easy to spot the call to action.This ensures that the recipient is not confused while taking the intended action.The intended action can be signing up for your newsletter, reading the blog post or downloading an eBook sent.
- The email is designed keeping email design guidelines in mind.If the email doesn’t open correctly, it will make your subscribers leave them very easily.
- At times, there are more than one call to action present which we might not realize are actually there.For e.g using social media buttons in the email.These might deflect the recipient to your social media profiles.But you want them to actually go to your blog and read your post? Right?So, you should test your call to actions too and optimize them for an improved performance.
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These were the three most important email marketing matrices every blogger must monitor to improve his blog performance.
Apart from these you must closely monitor your emails for bounce/spam complaints.
Also ensure that you keep a healthy relationship with your subscribers by sending them interesting and useful content on regular basis to nurture it into a great relationship.
Do you agree these are the most important email marketing matrices to monitor of a blogger? Please let me know in the comments below.
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