analytics Archives

Email Marketing Glossary: 10 Terms You Should Know

November 9, 2023 / Email Basics / By Alex Gallagher

Do you speak email marketing language? For email newbies, the unique terms marketers use can be a roadblock to getting started. If you want to cut through the jargon and make the most of your chosen email marketing tools, learning the language is an easy first step. Here are 10 terms to get you started on your path to email mastery.

Segmentation

In email marketing, segmentation involves dividing your email list into smaller categories based on specific characteristics or behaviors. With segmentation, you can send subscribers the most relevant information. Some common methods for segmentation include:

Interest groups
Segmentation by demographics (age, gender, etc.)
Segmentation by location
Behavior-based segmentation
Purchase-based segmentation
Engagement-based segmentation

Email marketing tools like Mailchimp provide straightforward options to begin segmenting your audience. Check out our guide to tags, groups, and segments for more info.

Personalization

Personalization means customizing email content for individual recipients. This may use a recipient’s name or past behavior, and is often simpler to set up than it sounds! Marketing platforms like Mailchimp and Klaviyo use merge tags to customize how an email will appear to each subscriber.

Deliverability

In simple terms, deliverability means keeping your emails out of spam. Several factors can impact deliverability, including domain configuration, list hygiene, and compliance with GDPR and CAN-SPAM regulations. Because deliverability is impacted by so many different variables, working with an email marketing expert is often the best way to address deliverability issues.

Accessibility

Accessibility in email marketing means designing emails everyone can enjoy. Subscribers with disabilities, especially people using screen readers, can often run into difficulties reading the content of an inaccessible email. By using alt text and high-contrast colors, email marketers can improve their emails’ accessibility and make them available to all.

Engagement

In email marketing, engagement is the level of responsiveness your audience has to your content. Some common ways of measuring engagement include click rates, open rates, and revenue. For more information, check out our article on email marketing metrics.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is the practice of sending two different versions of an email to a sample of your audience to determine which performs better. You may A/B test an email’s content, “from” name, subject line, or other elements.

Call-to-Action (CTA)

An email’s CTA prompts recipients to take a specific action, such as making a purchase or signing up. It typically takes the form of a text link or a button. Some emails may include multiple CTA’s, while others focus in on one main action.

List Hygiene

List hygiene is routine maintenance for your email audience. Marketers with good list hygiene regularly remove inactive and/or invalid email addresses. Maintaining a clean email list can help with deliverability. If you’ve never cleaned your list, try starting with a straightforward tool like Zerobounce.

Subject Lines

Subject lines are the brief text that appears at the top of an email. They typically give subscribers a glimpse of the email’s content, and can be thought of as an email’s “title.” All emails are required to have a subject line, so developing an engaging subject is essential for email marketing success.

Preview Text

Preview text is a snippet of text that accompanies the subject line. Depending on your email client, it may display slightly shorter or longer than the subject line. Preview text often contains a snippet of text from the email copy itself.

Go Beyond the Basics with Pure Firefly

Maximizing your email marketing success takes more than a grasp of the basics. Pure Firefly offers 1-on-1 training sessions on the nuances of Mailchimp strategy, template design, and campaign analytics. Or contact us to kick off ongoing marketing work including account set-up, Mailchimp audits, template creation, and more.

Mailchimp Campaign Analytics: Matching Metrics to Your Goals

September 21, 2023 / Mailchimp How-To, Marketing Strategy / By Alex Gallagher

Wondering how to measure your Mailchimp campaign performance? Start with analytics! For every email sent, Mailchimp provides in-depth analytics, including open rates, click rates, revenue, and more. This post will help you leverage campaign analytics in order to match Mailchimp’s Metrics with your goals.

Understanding Mailchimp Campaign Analytics

Mailchimp is a leader in email marketing analytics. As such, their campaign reports equip marketers with plenty of metrics to guide strategic marketing decisions. Here are some of the most valuable metrics Mailchimp provides to analyze your campaigns:

Open Rate: The % of recipients who opened your email
Click Rate: The % of recipients who clicked on any link in your email
Clicks Per Unique Opens: The % of openers who clicked on any link in your email
Bounces: The number of campaigns that were unable to deliver
Unsubscribers: The number of recipients who unsubscribed
Revenue: The total value of purchases made using links in your campaign

Each of the analytics above can reflect successes and failures in your strategy, leading to smarter marketing decisions.

How to Match Metrics to Campaign Objectives

Different campaigns have distinct objectives and thus require different metrics for evaluation. In order to make the best use of Mailchimp’s campaign analytics, begin by setting a clear goal. For example, you may want to boost sales on a particular product or win back subscribers who have become disengaged.

When you start with a goal in mind, it is easier to see what metric will most clearly reflect your success. Then, you can combine this primary metric with other campaign analytics in order to gain a more well-rounded view of your email’s performance.

Examples of Goal Alignment with Mailchimp Analytics

Wondering where to start with Mailchimp’s analytics? Here are some common campaign types, the goals they tend to target, and the metrics that will be most useful for measuring their success.

Welcome Email: Most welcome emails are intended to build a strong relationship with subscribers, and may direct recipients to an organization’s website. Focus on open rates, click rates, and unsubscribes.
Black Friday Promo: This promotion is aimed at boosting sales, so you can measure success with revenue.
Event Promotions: When your goal is gathering registrations for an event, connecting Mailchimp to your event platform is key. Not sure how to set it up? Consider working with an email marketing agency like Pure Firefly to develop an API integration.
Blog Update/General Newsletters: Many educational emails are intended to drive traffic to a particular website or article. On the Mailchimp side, that means tracking clicks is the way to go!

Maximize Your Metrics with Pure Firefly

Reaching your marketing goals is made even easier when you have a trusted partner in email marketing. Pure Firefly offers 1-on-1 training sessions on the nuances of Mailchimp strategy, template design, and campaign analytics. Or, contact us to kick off ongoing marketing work including account set-up, Mailchimp audits, template creation, and more.

Does Mailchimp Go to Spam? 5 Deliverability FAQs

May 2, 2023 / Mailchimp How-To / By Alex Gallagher

New Mailchimp users often ask: Does Mailchimp go to spam? The answer is, it depends. Who a user sends to, what they send, and how they send it all factor into their email deliverability. The good news is that Mailchimp takes several steps to help its users’ emails stay out of the spam folder.

When Does Mailchimp Go to Spam?

There are many reasons why a sender might find their emails are ending up in the spam folder. Believe it or not, the exact requirements inbox service providers check for spam are kept secret. This helps to prevent spammers from gaming the system. However, there are some guidelines which can help you make progress towards better deliverability.

If you’re wondering why your Mailchimp emails are going to spam, try the following steps:

Use a balance of images and text
Remove any all-caps from your subject line & email body
Watch out for common spam-triggering words and phrases
Check any custom HTML for errors
Ensure your DNS records are configured correctly

One major benefit of using a platform like Mailchimp is that deliverability guidance is built in. Mailchimp offers helpful tips, and will alert you if it detects a red flag on your account.

Why Does Abuse Prevention Matter for Deliverability?

Abuse prevention does more than keep Mailchimp’s public image strong. Deliverability and abuse prevention go hand in hand. By preventing abuse, Mailchimp keeps its users’ sender reputations high. This improves the likelihood that all Mailchimp emails will land in the inbox instead of the spam folder.

Did Mailchimp Put a Block on My Account?

If Mailchimp’s Compliance Team finds a red flag in your account, you’ll find a warning under your account settings. Typically, Mailchimp will also provide you with steps to resolve the issue. Be forewarned: multiple red flags can lead to permanent suspension.

Common red flags include:

Fake or anonymous account information
Using a free email service like gmail
Importing subscribers who haven’t opted in
Noncompliance with Mailchimp terms of use
Spikes in bounced emails, unsubscribes, or abuse reports

How Can I Monitor My Mailchimp Deliverability?

While Mailchimp takes several steps to help its users’ emails stay out of the spam folder, there are still some actions that you can take to monitor and improve your deliverability. Here are a few tips to help you get started:

Monitor your email campaign statistics: Pay attention to your email campaign statistics, including open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and spam complaint rates. These metrics can help you identify any issues and adjust your email content and send frequency accordingly. If subscribers find your content valuable, they are less likely to report it as spam.
Keep your email list clean: Regularly remove inactive or disengaged subscribers from your email list to improve your deliverability. Mailchimp offers a variety of segmentation tools to help you manage your audiences and clean the old emails out. Plus, a list cleaning software like ZeroBounce can provide added insights on your audience.
Authenticate your domain: Authentication methods, such as DKIM and SPF, verify that your emails are coming from a trusted source and can improve your deliverability. Authenticating your domain with Mailchimp is one important step in this process. Consider a Mailchimp training if you need authentication support.
Test your emails before sending: Use Mailchimp’s preview and test tools to ensure your emails look and function as intended across different devices and email clients. Testing your emails can also help you identify issues in the code, which can have an impact on deliverability.

Where Can I Find More Deliverability Help?

For deliverability assistance, including domain authentication and audience analysis, consider working with a Mailchimp Pro Partner like Pure Firefly. Our email experts are trained in the most up-to-date deliverability guidelines. We can also help you identify why your emails are going to spam. Mailchimp & WordPress are our specialties, and we have familiarity with several popular domain registrars.

Our Mailchimp audit is one of the most valuable services to ensure your account is optimized for deliverability. Reach out for a free quote any time!

nonprofit team members in a circle around a red cartoon heart

Nonprofit Email Marketing: Where to Start

March 17, 2023 / Marketing Strategy / By Alex Gallagher

Nonprofits on a tight budget should never overlook the potential of email marketing for their work. By harnessing the particularities of email marketing for nonprofits, you can effectively boost engagement, attendance, and donations.

The possibilities are vast, and starting is simple. Here’s our beginner’s guide in 5 simple steps.

1. Curate Your Email Marketing Audience

Before you start sending, you need an audience! The good news is that nonprofit organizations often have a head start on audience building through in-person events and volunteer connections. You may grow your audience through any of the following tactics:

Have people sign up using pen & paper at your next in-person event
Invite past volunteers to subscribe to your list
Include an opt-in form wherever you collect donations
Share a signup form with your social media network
Add signup forms to your website using popups or landing pages

To start email marketing on the right foot, focus on organic growth. Start with your most loyal community members, and make opting in and out simple. Be sure to clean any large audience list before importing.

Above all else, never buy, rent, or “scrape” an audience. If you send to contacts who haven’t agreed to receive your emails, you may see a spike in unsubscribes and spam reports and run the risk of sending to spam traps. Spam traps are false email addresses that service providers use to keep spammers at bay.

If Mailchimp detects spam traps in your audience or sees a spike in abuse reports, your account will be put under investigation and may be terminated. It’s better to start small than to lose your progress altogether because of poor audience acquisition practices.

2. Plan Out Your Email Marketing Strategy

Once you have an email marketing audience, it’s time to brainstorm about what email updates you’d like to send. Take a moment to think over the following questions as they relate to your nonprofit:

What’s one key action I want subscribers to take?
What does my organization offer to subscribers & the world at large?
How does my organization serve the present moment? (day, year, or decade)

Your organization’s core goals and values should drive any email marketing campaign. They make up the “why” of your email strategy: Why am I sending this email?

Once you know why you’re sending, consider what you’re sending. Monthly newsletters are a common place to start for nonprofits. A monthly newsletter provides space to share the latest updates on your work, as well as a calendar of events, relevant news articles, and more.

Consider how you can use segmentation in your email marketing strategy. Many organizations now are leaning towards targeted emails over longer general updates. Consider creating different kinds of emails for different portions of your audience. For example, event invitations could be a great fit for local community members, but less relevant to donors overseas.

Most email marketers send a mix of segmented & unsegmented emails to engage their full audience effectively. Try starting with one general newsletter and one targeted campaign to build your experience in both areas.

3. Build Your First Email Marketing Campaign

Designing your first email campaign doesn’t have to be daunting. Email marketing services like Mailchimp provide no-code options for building any email. You may even contract an agency or designer to create mobile responsive templates you can customize with updated content.

Whether you work with a designer or build your first template yourself, always keep in mind that people tend to skim emails, and over 40% of subscribers now open emails on mobile devices. This makes concise text, large headers, and relevant images essential. Use a hierarchy of information to plan your first email design, and direct subscribers toward a specific call to action.

For your first email design, consider creating a welcome email. Welcome automations are essential for any organization with an email list, as they provide an opportunity to connect with subscribers as soon as they sign up. Some other options for your first email could be a simple “hello” letting your audience know what you’ll be sending or a first newsletter with your most important updates from the past year.

4. Test, Test, Test

Once your first campaign has been sent, set aside some time to review its performance. For Mailchimp users, a report is generated on every campaign and updated in real-time. Consider these key metrics to analyze the success of your email campaigns:

Open Rate: Shows % of subscribers who opened an email. This can measure subject line & preview text efficacy, as well as send date & time.
Click Rate & Clicks per Unique Open: Click rate shows the % of subscribers who clicked on any link in an email, while clicks per unique open (also known as click-to-open rate) shows the % of openers who went on to click on an email’s links. These metrics are helpful for measuring the effectiveness of an email’s content and design.
Bounces & Unsubscribes: Track the health of your audience by following trends in your bounces and unsubscribes. A sudden spike in either of these metrics indicates that your audience needs to be cleaned.

5. Develop Your Nonprofit’s Email Marketing with Pure Firefly

If you’d like a hand with starting an effective email marketing strategy, consider working with Pure Firefly. We offer one-on-one strategy calls, copywriting & design, and in-depth audits to ensure you’re making the most of your Mailchimp account. Check out our services to learn more, and contact us anytime for a quote!