Last updated on February 8th, 2024 at 04:39 am
Email marketing can be incredibly effective.
In fact, according to DMA’s “Marketer Email Tracker 2020” report, marketers estimated that the ROI for every £1 spent on email marketing was £35.41. That’s an insane 3541% return on investment!
But you need to be clear about what you are trying to achieve if you want to get great results with email marketing.
That’s why today we are going to discuss the email marketing goals and objectives that you should focus on.
What is the Purpose of Email Marketing?
The primary purpose of email marketing is to convert leads into paying customers and then into repeat customers.
This means that the ultimate measure of email marketing success is sales. Are your sales increasing?
Make sure to always keep that in mind because it’s easy to caught up in the weeds with all the other metrics and lose track of your end goal.
Now, all that being said, here are the five email marketing objectives that we recommend setting:
Objective #1: Improve Email Deliverability
Email deliverability is the ability of an email to reach the recipient.
It’s measured by a metric called the deliverability rate which shows the percentage of emails sent that are delivered to the recipient.
Say, if your deliverability rate is 97, that means that if you send an email to 100 subscribers, it will be delivered to 97 of them.
Here are the two key factors that affect email deliverability:
- The reputation of your email marketing service provider – Make sure that you choose an established, reputable company with an email deliverability rate of at least 95.
- Your reputation as a sender – Avoid getting flagged for spam at all costs. Don’t add people to your email list without their permission, be mindful of your email frequency, and provide an unsubscribe link at the end of every email. And never send spam!
Objective #2: Improve Inbox Placement
Email deliverability rate is a useful metric but it doesn’t tell the entire story.
It’s probably safe to say that the vast majority of people only pay attention to emails that land in their inboxes as opposed to spam, promotions, social, or other folders.
This means that ensuring the email is delivered isn’t enough, you need it to land in the recipient’s inbox. But how can you do that?
There’s no surefire method that would guarantee inbox placement but you can increase the likelihood of reaching the inbox by encouraging engagement.
One way to do that is to ask your subscribers to respond to your “Welcome” email with a simple “hi” message.
(You can explain that it’s to ensure they get your emails in the future.)
That will indicate to their email service provider that you are a legit sender whose emails are welcome, not some random spammer that should be ignored.
Objective #3: Increase Open Rates
Open rate is a metric that shows what percentage of subscribers who received the email opened it.
Say, if you send an email to 100 subscribers and 20 of them open it, the open rate of that email is 20%.
And the most important factor that determines your open rates is your subject lines – they need to be compelling enough to get people to click.
Here are three ways to create compelling subject lines:
- Benefit-driven subject lines convey what’s in it for the subscriber
- Curiosity-driven subject lines pique the subscriber’s curiosity
- Pattern-interrupt subject lines that are so wacko that the subscriber can’t help but open the email just to see what it’s all about
Of course, if someone opens your email but finds its content disappointing, they will be less likely to open your emails in the future.
And if that continues happening, eventually they will stop opening your emails altogether.
That’s why you also need to make sure that each and every email provides value if you want to keep your open rates high!
Objective #4: Increase Click-Through Rates
Click-through rate, also known as CTR, is a metric that shows what percentage of people that opened your email clicked on a link within it.
Say, if you send an email with a link to your sales page to 100 subscribers and 5 of them click through to your sales page, the click-through rate of that email is 5%.
Here are some ideas for increasing your click-through rate:
- Improve your email copy – If you want people to click on the link at the end of your email, you first need to get them to read that email. We recommend “Copywriting Secrets” if you want to learn how to write emails that convert. More on that later.
- Have a clear call to action – What do you want people to do next? You must make that clear.
- Consider adding a call-to-action button – Text links can work well but we recommend A/B testing adding a call-to-action button to your emails.
Objective #5: Increase Sales
As we have already discussed, the primary purpose of email marketing is to convert leads into paying customers and then into repeat customers. This means that the most important metric you need to pay attention to is sales.
But increasing sales can be complicated because there are so many factors that contribute to it such as:
- The quality of traffic you are driving to your sales funnel
- The way your sales funnel is set up
- Email copywriting
- Sales page copywriting
- Your reputation
…etc.
The most important thing here is to understand the big picture of your business.
Don’t zoom in on email marketing, zoom out and look at your entire sales funnel instead. How does everything work together?
This will allow you to correctly identify what issues you need to address in order to increase sales.
Say, if you send low-quality traffic to your sales funnel, then convert it into low-quality leads, improving email copywriting won’t make much difference because it’s not the copywriting that’s the problem.
However, if you send high-quality traffic to your sales funnel, then convert it into high-quality leads, improving email copywriting can have a huge impact on your bottom line.
Email Marketing Benchmarks
Now you know what objectives you should set.
But what benchmarks should you use to evaluate the performance of your email marketing campaigns?
In 2022, MailerLite analyzed data from over 40,000 approved MailerLite customer accounts based in the USA, Canada, and the UK.
The eventual dataset included over 1 million campaigns that were sent to more than 10 recipients.
Here are the email marketing benchmarks that this research has established:
- Average open rate: 37.65%
- Average click rate: 3.36%
- Average click-through rate (CTR): 8.93%
- Average unsubscribe rate: 0.24%
- Average bounce rate: 0.30%
And here’s the email marketing benchmark breakdown by industry:
| Industry | Open Rate | Click Rate | CTR | Unsubscribe Rate | Bounce Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agency | 35.46% | 3.08% | 8.69% | 0.32% | 0.76% |
| Agriculture and Food Services | 42.90% | 3.77% | 8.80% | 0.28% | 0.36% |
| Animal Care and Veterinary | 45.84% | 2.77% | 6.05% | 0.47% | 0.53% |
| Architecture and Construction | 39.82% | 5.68% | 14.26% | 0.46% | 1.32% |
| Artist | 44.88% | 4.38% | 9.77% | 0.43% | 0.36% |
| Art gallery and museum | 45.69% | 2.57% | 5.63% | 0.34% | 0.29% |
| Arts and Artists | 37.23% | 3.75% | 10.07% | 0.31% | 0.33% |
| Automotive | 42.71% | 3.29% | 7.7% | 0.22% | 0.29% |
| Author | 33.73% | 3.92% | 11.62% | 0.32% | 0.25% |
| Beauty and Personal Care | 39.89% | 2.74% | 6.87% | 0.41% | 0.35% |
| Blogger | 42.23% | 5.98% | 14.17% | 0.18% | 0.22% |
| Business and Finance | 36.49% | 2.14% | 5.86% | 0.21% | 0.34% |
| Computers and Electronics | 39.98% | 2.22% | 5.54% | 0.14% | 0.23% |
| Construction | 33.85% | 4.92% | 14.54% | 0.35% | 1.15% |
| Consulting | 36.89% | 2.73% | 7.39% | 0.30% | 0.44% |
| Creative Services/Agency | 39.98% | 3.4% | 8.49% | 0.34% | 0.36% |
| E-commerce | 36.59% | 2.62% | 7.16% | 0.29% | 0.30% |
| Educational institution | 35.43% | 2.95% | 8.33% | 0.18% | 0.49% |
| Education and Training | 37.81% | 2.85% | 7.53% | 0.19% | 0.33% |
| Entertainment and Events | 36.16% | 2.4% | 6.63% | 0.27% | 0.30% |
| Finance | 41.44% | 2.04% | 4.91% | 0.29% | 0.55% |
| Games | 29.88% | 3.44% | 11.52% | 0.2% | 0.27% |
| Government | 46.3% | 3.64% | 7.86% | 0.1% | 0.42% |
| Health and Fitness | 41.23% | 2.83% | 6.87% | 0.36% | 0.31% |
| Higher Education | 44.74% | 3.31% | 7.4% | 0.3% | 0.84% |
| Hobbies | 36.52% | 3.95% | 10.81% | 0.21% | 0.25% |
| Home and Garden | 38.26% | 4.32% | 11.29% | 0.24% | 0.26% |
| Information Technology (IT) | 33.53% | 2.12% | 6.32% | 0.23% | 0.43% |
| Insurance | 39.32% | 2.15% | 5.48% | 0.29% | 0.65% |
| Legal | 39.26% | 2.45% | 6.23% | 0.26% | 0.72% |
| Manufacturing | 41.07% | 3.92% | 9.55% | 0.33% | 0.6% |
| Marketing and Advertising | 38.26% | 2.88% | 7.52% | 0.25% | 0.29% |
| Coaching | 38.27% | 2.02% | 5.28% | 0.37% | 0.3% |
| Media | 40.67% | 6.33% | 15.58% | 0.09% | 0.2% |
| Media and Publishing | 33.35% | 3.51% | 10.51% | 0.18% | 0.22% |
| Medical, Dental, and Healthcare | 46.29% | 3.14% | 6.79% | 0.39% | 0.67% |
| Music and Musicians | 38.98% | 2.53% | 6.48% | 0.34% | 0.39% |
| Non-profit | 42.43% | 3.76% | 8.86% | 0.18% | 0.41% |
| Online Courses and Coaching | 33.84% | 2.45% | 7.23% | 0.22% | 0.27% |
| Other | 36.26% | 3.17% | 8.74% | 0.27% | 0.34% |
| Photo and Video | 42.53% | 2.6% | 6.11% | 0.45% | 0.42% |
| Politics | 39.9% | 1.09% | 2.73% | 0.35% | 0.42% |
| Public Relations | 35.89% | 1.86% | 5.18% | 0.14% | 0.38% |
| Publishing company | 40.85% | 2.37% | 5.79% | 0.21% | 0.19% |
| Real Estate | 41.59% | 3.61% | 8.68% | 0.21% | 0.31% |
| Recruitment and Staffing | 44.25% | 2.63% | 5.95% | 0.4% | 0.42% |
| Religion | 41.19% | 4.92% | 11.95% | 0.14% | 0.26% |
| Restaurant | 40.88% | 1.66% | 4.05% | 0.48% | 0.38% |
| Retail | 40.56% | 3.13% | 7.71% | 0.18% | 0.24% |
| Software and Web App | 39.77% | 1.16% | 2.91% | 0.3% | 0.57% |
| Sports | 39.29% | 4.22% | 10.74% | 0.15% | 0.39% |
| Telecommunications | 39.13% | 5.32% | 13.58% | 0.07% | 0.2% |
| Travel and Transportation | 39.36% | 2.68% | 6.81% | 0.26% | 0.35% |
Learn to Write Emails That CONVERT With “Copywriting Secrets”!
Copywriting is what makes or breaks email marketing.
But what if you already have too much on your plate and don’t have the time to devote yourself to mastering it?
“Copywriting Secrets” is a book that was designed to serve as a SHORTCUT for busy entrepreneurs that want to write copy that converts.
Here’s how its author Jim Edwards explains it:
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If you’ve ever been frustrated by lack of sales, lack of clicks, or lack of subscribers… This is the book you’ve been looking for!”
You don’t even have to finish “Copywriting Secrets” before you begin implementing Jim’s advice – you can start putting it into practice as you are reading the book.
And if you do it right then you should start seeing results ASAP.
You can get a paperback copy of “Copywriting Secrets” for FREE – all Jim asks is that you cover the shipping.
So what are you waiting for?
It’s time to start writing emails that CONVERT!
