Email Marketing Part 3: Analytics
In last week’s blog, we touched on the subject of analytics as a means of refining your strategy and maintaining your lists. Now that you’ve sent your first email, you’ll likely be wondering how analytics are supposed to inform your strategy going forward.
As part of our ongoing series on email marketing for real estate professionals, this week we’re going to explore the meanings behind several different metrics you’ll use and why they matter. Just what is a click-through rate, anyway? What’s the difference between a hard bounce and a soft bounce, and why should you care?
Open rates
The open rate is exactly what it sounds like, and it tells you how many people opened your email message. Unfortunately, it’s a little more complex than that because some email clients such as Yahoo or even your iPhone automatically open emails, which can skew this metric. Other email clients won’t automatically load images, which is important because open rates are tracked with an impression pixel. So if images aren’t downloaded, the email isn’t measured as having been opened.
The best way to use open rates is for comparison. In other words, if your email open rates last month were 10 percent and they’re 20 percent this month, then your campaigns are doing better. You can also track open rates from email to email. If you go over your last five or six emails and see that one had a better open rate, what was distinct about that one that you can implement in future campaigns?
As far as what open rates are good vs. which ones are bad, that question is entirely dependent on industry. Open rates for real estate are notoriously low, but all the same measure your own performance alongside industry averages, which most email list providers include in your analytics.
Click-through rates
Click-through rates, sometimes abbreviated as CTR, are also pretty easy to understand. If someone clicks one of the links in your email message, you’ve got a click. This is why, in our last blog, we emphasized simplicity and focusing on one action or link: the easier it is for a recipient to find the action you want to take, the more likely it is that they’ll click. The click-through rate is how many recipients out of one hundred clicked somewhere on your email message, and it’s measured as a percentage. If 20 out of 100 recipients clicked on a link, you’ll have a 20 percent click-through rate.
Like open rates, the question of what constitutes a good click-through rate depends on what industry you’re in. Again, performance averages for real estate emails are generally pretty low, so as long as you’re above the industry average you’re probably doing okay.
The easiest way to improve your click-through rate is to make your emails mobile-friendly because, as we mentioned last week, most people these days tend to open and read emails on their phones as soon as they get them. There’s no better way to kill click-through rates than to have your emails be unreadable for half your subscribers. Also consider making the buttons and links in your emails larger, because again, a good amount of subscribers may open them on their phones and you want them to be able to easily operate the links. Desktop users won’t mind a larger-than-average link or button.
Unsubscribe rate
Your unsubscribe rate is measured per email sent, and it shows you how many people out of 100 unsubscribed from the email message you just sent (so again, it’s a percentage). Though like most metrics it’s mostly specific to industry, you still want to keep yours well below 1 percent.
We suggest keeping an eye on your unsubscribe rates to see if there are any spikes. If it jumps noticeably for one email, then that’s a pretty clear indication that your subscribers didn’t much care for that particular one. If you notice a spike in ubsubscribes, pinpoint the distinct things about that particular email that may have prompted recipients to unsubscribe and strike them from future campaigns.
Hard bounces
These next two are sometimes compiled into one metric: your bounce rate. The bounce rate shows emails that were undeliverable for whatever reason. Hard bounces are the most important, because they can affect your emails’ deliverability in the future and will drive your metrics down across the board. Hard bounces happen when you’ve sent a message to an email address that no longer exists. The major ISPs like Gmail and Hotmail monitor hard bounces closely, so you should too.
You should remove people from your list after even one hard bounce. Some email service providers will do this for you, but don’t sit back and wait for them to act. If you don’t remove those addresses, your deliverability rate goes down and you could risk being automatically shuttled to spam folders – especially for Gmail addresses – when sending emails in the future.
A reduced delivery rate doesn’t sound like much at first, but when 10 percent of your emails are undeliverable, that affects your standing with the main ISPs and it skews your metrics downward anyway, which will impact how you measure performance.
Soft bounces
Soft bounces occur when you send an email to an inbox that’s full. As soon as that person deletes a few emails, they’ll get your new email. This doesn’t happen too often because most users routinely clean active email accounts.
What that means is soft bounces are usually the result of people signing up for your list with junk or disposable email accounts. It’s actually a pretty common practice for users to maintain a disposable email account to use when they have to give up their email address to get something, such as a free trial. This is less common in real estate (especially because most of the time real estate email lists don’t offer subscribers something that would otherwise cost money).
In other words, soft bounces aren’t something to get too worked up over. If you notice that the soft bounce rate per email is edging above 2 or 3 percent, you may want to clean out your list. It’s a near certainty that an address that generates a soft bounce is probably one that isn’t checked often or at all.
Complaint/abuse rate
This one is important, because the abuse rate (sometimes called complaint rate) is how many out of 100 subscribers actually labeled your email message as spam. Abuse complaints are serious business and not taken lightly by ISPs. Still, even the most carefully curated and well-managed lists get a few here and there.
You don’t want your complaint rate to ever get higher than 0.05 percent. An average complaint rate is about 0.02 percent but as with most metrics, a lot depends on which industry you’re in. Real estate is a double-edged sword, unfortunately: while you’re probably not sending spammy content, there’s always the chance that someone will have subscribed to your list and think, “I don’t want this wholesaler email, I’m not even looking for a home right now.” The best defense is to carefully segment your lists and remember to solicit the subscriptions of people who will actually be interested in your content.
The easiest way to reduce complaints is to make the unsubscribe link as simple as possible to find and use. The most common reason people mark emails as spam is because they don’t want the hassle of finding a hidden unsubscribe link and then going through the steps some unscrupulous marketers require to get off the list.
In other words, if someone receives an email that’s not relevant and wants to remove themselves from the list, don’t make it hard for them. They’re much less likely to report your email if they can unsubscribe quickly and easily. At the end of the day, an extra unsubscribe is much less serious than an abuse report.
Forward rate
Your forward rate measures how many people out of 100 opened and read your email, liked it, and then forwarded along to a friend. Forward rates are also sometimes called “referral rates.” Some mailing list providers only classify a referral as when the email is forwarded, while other count social media shares, too.
The easiest way to increase referral rates is to have share buttons within your emails. Recipients should be able to share the email across various platforms, and you should include all of the major ones. Keep in mind that sometimes a recipient would rather tweet something they liked rather than forward it in an email, which may seem intrusive to them. On the plus side, a tweet or Facebook share will reach a lot more people too!
For more perspectives on real estate investment and web practices, check back with us each week as we post new blogs and be sure to sign up for our Priority Access List for advance listings and market updates. We’ll see you next week, and in the meantime, don’t forget that you can also keep up with us on Facebook and Twitter!
- Get It Right Solutions