When you first delve into email marketing, you’re likely to run across terms that you’ve never heard before. Email marketing and schematics have their own lingo that doesn’t really relate to the rest of the world. However, as you start to learn the ropes, you’ll find that most of these terms are still easy to understand. Here are four common email marketing terms you might come across as you start email marketing.
Open Rate
Open Rate is the rate at which your emails are opened by recipients. Pretty self-explanatory, right? However, it’s important to keep in mind that opened emails are not the same as read emails. Studies show that half of all emails that are opened are open for less than 2 seconds. So just because you have an open rate of 30% doesn’t mean 30% of your contacts have been reached by your email marketing plan. It’s important to create engaging emails that hold the recipient’s attention, and to send out reminders if too much time goes by with no result.
Delivery Rate
The delivery rate is the opposite of your bounce rate, that is, the rate of emails that come back with a “message could not be delivered” message. Much like the open rate doesn’t necessarily mean that amount of people read the email, a delivered message does not necessarily mean the recipient ever saw the email. Email providers will sometimes sort your email into spam if your account seems like an unreliable source. To keep a solid reputation, keep your bounce rate low by cleaning out inactive contacts quarterly.
Sender Score
When you apply for a loan, your credit history is submitted to create a credit score. When you use email marketing, a company called Return Path collects data from your IP address to create a Sender Score. Your Sender Score determines how much spam your account sends, and shows you your reputation as a ender. Return Path is a free website with plenty of free resources as well as premium resources that can help you improve your email marketing’s effectiveness.
Relevance
Relevance measures how interesting and, well, relevant your message was to your contacts. Did it address a question or concern they might have? Did it provide information useful to their career or personal life? Was it engaging? In email marketing, relevance is perhaps the most important factor to consider. If you know what interests your contacts and how to reach them, they’ll be much more likely to respond to your emails and take an interest in your product or service.
In email marketing, a clean email list is an effective email list. Make sure you clean your email list every quarter to remove inactive contacts and take stock of your current email marketing technique. Is it working? Is there somewhere where you need to improve? Whether you handle your email list yourself or hire the help of an email list repair service, these four terms are important to keep in mind and refer back to.
