open rate 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.