Email Analytics: 8 Strategies to Boost Performance

As an industrial supplier you inevitably have brand-building and keeping an engaged audience as your top priorities. To market your products or services you have probably dealt with email marketing. To successfully master the art of email marketing you will need to pay a careful attention to your email analytics and find ways to continuously improve it. Email marketing for different sectors of business varies from frequent to not as frequent, but the basics remain invariant.

Email marketing has been proven time and again to be a valuable tool in your marketing arsenal as a means for keeping customers in the loop and thinking about your business. Often you will find it useful to use online tools to help you automate some of your email marketing, but regardless of the tools there are  some basics to keep in mind. 

If you are new to the marketing world of industrial products and want to add a newsletter to your business, please read on. We will dive into some ways you can help grow your email campaigns or email newsletters. We will cover 8 strategies to help boost your email analytics, but also what analytics you should keep in mind when trying to measure your email effectiveness.

Email Writing Photo by Cytonn Photography on Unsplash

1. Plan out email marketing strategy

First and foremost, it is important to know your audience when it comes to email marketing. Evaluating your audience is a great place to start to understand who you are targeting and what type of people are interested in your company and email content. In the niche of your specific industry you should already have a pretty good opinion who your customers are. As you visualize the audience you will start picturing the type of content that might keep them engaged. 

Many other companies have to worry about age and other categories that are not as important in the world of industrial products such as lasers, photonics, robotics, etc. Given this specialization, really lean into the correct lingo and vernacular. If you see more customers from a science background you can cover more in depth applications and use cases of your products. If more buyers are signing up from a non-science background, have a healthy mix of highly practical and useful content sprinkled with some marketing. 

With certain email tools, you can segment your subscriber lists into different niches of your business. Later we will get into other important factors like timing out emails so it does not get overlooked by people in other time zones. 

2. Make your emails personable 

This helps you break apart from any spam lists. The more personalized, the higher chance the algorithm will not label you as spam in someone’s inbox. 

Sometimes this also means attaching your emails to a founder’s email or email with a name instead of the generic company email. This also helps show you as a smaller and more intimate business. Although your emails are supposed to help generate more sales, trying to make them personable helps recipients see beyond the sale. 

If you are able to automate your email, to begin with, “Hello [Recipient’s first name]” they are more likely to feel engaged and continue reading. Having a higher open-rate with your emails is an important analytic metric to measure in order to boost sales. 

3. Use fun email subject lines to improve email analytics 

Subject lines are probably the shortest but also most important written part of your emails. They are the first thing people read and use to decide if they want to open your email. Try and play around with your business’s voice and find new ways to engage customers. 

Some fun ways are through asking questions or teasing what is inside the email. Try to stray away from something too straight-up and instead find ways to peak people’s interest. 

If you really want to add some pops of color, you might want to add emojis, sparingly! But be careful this might work with existing and tried audience but might not work with newer subscribers. 

Emoji Photo by Wu Yi on Unsplash

4. Talk about the benefits of your product and less about features

Some people want to list the features of the product and business in order to generate sales. I’m here to say anyone can do that, so let’s look outside the box. 

If you truly are getting personal, you’ll want to look into the benefits of your business and product in the emails. Use relevant events like recent customer testimonials, additions to new products or software, and so on. Match the subject line with the benefit to the customer and you have got some interesting content for your customers. 

5. Do not complicate things 

It is harder nowadays to hold people’s attention, so do not add a lot of fluff to your emails. Keep your messaging concise and to the point of interest. Try and look at press release examples and write similarly with attention to detail and harder-hitting facts/additions. If people want to read more, link to your website.

Try to keep the email readable in under 3 minutes so most of the content is read by the reader when opened. Remember there is a lot of noise in every customer’s inbox, try and use the email tactics with a customer in mind and less with your messaging in mind. This will help your emails get read. 

6. End with a call to action 

Make sure your email has the next steps in mind. What did you want the customer to do when they read your email? Add it and make sure to bold or highlight it so it pops. Are you reminding them of your recent demo? Did you want to promote a piece of research the founder posted? Always add the next steps or tasks that the customer should do after reading your email. 

It can be a direct request or something you want the customer to look at. These can include:

• Check out our new vendor page on FindLight’s Website!
• Download our new [product x]’s fact sheet 
• Take a look at our newest research article at [link]
• Our founder recently gave a TED Talk, take a look at [link]

A call to action will help boost your email analytics in terms of click rates, which will also help your website views.

Email Writing Austin Distel on Unsplash

7. Choose the right times to send out to boost your email analytics

Make sure to pay attention to where you are sending your emails (aka what time zone). This will help your open rate. Many customers will check their emails before and after work, so try sending them around 10 am or 3-4 pm on weekdays. 

If you have a wide variety of time zones on your email list, try sending them in the morning PT time and allowing them to slowly enter other inboxes throughout the day. This is only if you HAVE to send the email to the full list. Try and keep it more targeted other times. 

8. Measure the following metrics for successful email analytics

• Open rate 
• Click rate 
• List growth rate 
• Bounce rate 
• Share rate 
• Unsubscribe rate / Spam Rate 

Email marketing is an important part of engaging customers and keeping customers engaged with your business’s updates. If done well, they can help boost sales and bring more traffic to your website. If you like this article please share and subscribe!