Do you send out hundreds of emails to your entire contact list, but see very few people actually engaging or interacting? It may be time to check your performance metrics, specifically your email open rates and click-through rates (CTRs), to see how you’re comparing to the rest of your industry.

Most email marketing softwares, such as Constant Contact and MailChimp, allow you to view this data (and much more) about every email you’ve sent. To help increase your chances of customer engagement, familiarize yourself with these performance metrics below.

Once you’ve calculated your email open rate or have attained it from your marketing platform, it’s now time to understand how you compare to the rest of the industry. To do this, you can use the average industry rate as a benchmark, which contains data pulled from other businesses in the same industry. To find the average industry rate for your specific industry, we recommend using this tool:  Find Your Average Industry Email Open Rate

Here are a few suggestions to improve your email open rates:

• Focus on your subject line, make it catchy and less spam-like, while keeping it short.
• Time the emails appropriately and according to insights.
• Write for your audience, not for yourself! Target your audience based on the emails you’re sending. Relevancy is key!
• Make sure to use a recognizable name when sending the email so contacts know who it’s from.

Once you’ve mastered the skill of creating emails people will actually open, the next step is to keep them engaged while reading the email. This relates to click-through rates (CTRs), which is “simply the percentage of people who opened the email and clicked at least one link, button, or clickable image link within the email.”

A few tips to increase your click-through rate:

• Place call-to-actions and important links towards the top of the page.
• Make sure it looks great on a mobile device.
• Keep fonts consistent throughout the email.
• Add links to logos and images.
• Avoid repetitive phrases such as “Click Here”
• Don’t forget social sharing buttons and icons

Whether you’re an experienced email marketer or are just beginning your campaign, it’s important to track your performance on a regular basis. By using these suggestions and understanding email open rates and click-through-rates, we believe your email marketing campaign can be a success!