Every day, millions of businesses of all sizes use email marketing to effectively engage with customers, increase website traffic, and drive marketing campaigns. There’s a good reason for this; remember that for every £1 spent on email in the UK, around £25 of revenue is created!

I’ve written about the benefits of email marketing in the past, but what sort of results should you expect when sending your next email?

Open rate

The average open rate for UK SMEs is 22.87%.

Don’t be despondent that this suggests only one in five will be reading your email. An ‘open’ is only triggered when someone enables the images in your email, and if they don’t do this it won’t be counted. So with that in mind you might have more readers than openers!

We recommend that you aim for a 20-30% open rate with your campaigns. If you’re not hitting that mark then it could be down to your content, your subject line or the quality of your data (to name just a few potential issues).

How to get people opening – getting your subject line right

Subject lines are the first thing someone views when receiving an email and are therefore vital in getting those ‘open rates’ up.

Subject lines with 30 characters or fewer are the most successful, and personalised subject lines are 20% more likely to be opened, so if you have this in your data locker then get it out and include your recipient’s name as an example (if your data isn’t great this can go horribly wrong so don’t try if you’ve not got the quality!)

Keep it free from ‘spammy’ words. SALE NOW ON!!! will go straight to junk due to the excessive exclamation marks, the caps, and the wording. Avoid these three things and your email should sail straight into the inbox.

It’s also important to make sure your email is mobile friendly. 50% of emails are opened on smartphones and tablets – that’s a 500% increase in the past four years!

Click through rates

A key goal of your email marketing should be to encourage people to click through to your website and read more. The UK average is 3.26%, but we suggest that you aim for 25% of those opening your email, then clicking on a link.

Getting the clicks

You need people to click, so you need to tell them to click. Big buttons will show recipients exactly what they need to do, and where to click. Making it obvious is vital here! A link hidden within text isn’t going to cut the mustard! Also make things such as your images clickable to the same news story; the more opportunities they have to click the more likely they’re going to!

If you’d like to find out more about how we can help your email marketing then give us a call on 01566 784860 or email hello@mihidigital.co.uk