Email marketing indicators such as open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates can help you analyze your newsletter campaigns. This article shows how to determine and optimize these indicators and provides insights into comparative values from studies.
Newsletter marketing is still one of the most cost-effective ways to reach customers with relevant and target group-specific topics. Newsletters can be used to communicate emotional and informative content and to promote products and services. This leads to stronger customer loyalty and increased sales.
Key email marketing indicators
The following key figures are considered relevant for the analysis and subsequent optimization of hotel email campaigns:
OPENING RATE
The open rate of a newsletter is the number of recipients who have opened an email. There is a difference between the total open rate, which counts all opens from a single recipient, and the unique open rate, which counts only the number of recipients who opened the email, not the number of opens. The unique open rate is calculated as follows
Unique opens : (number of recipients - bounces) * 100
CLICK RATE
The click rate describes the percentage of users who clicked on a link in the newsletter and refers to the total number of recipients. Again, it can be the number of all clicks or just the number of individual recipients who clicked. In the latter case, it is called the unique click rate:
Unique clicks : (number of recipients - bounces) * 100
CLICK-THROUGH-RATE (CTR)
This calculates the proportion of recipients who clicked on a link after opening the e-mail. The value is thus used to put the clicking recipients in proportion to the opening recipients. The CTR is calculated as follows:
Clicking recipients : Opening recipients * 100
BOUNCERATE
This describes the proportion of failed deliveries to the total number of recipients. The bounce rate results from hard bounces, soft bounces and spam bounces. Hard bounces (permanent bounces) are addresses to which e-mails cannot be delivered permanently. This may be because the e-mail address or domain name no longer exists or because the recipient's e-mail server has blocked delivery.
The soft bounces (temporary bounces), on the other hand, are only temporarily unavailable, which may be due to a crowded inbox or temporary server problems. Spam bounces refer to the marking of a delivered e-mail as spam. Many e-mail programs have automatic functions for this purpose, whereby certain e-mails are moved to the spam folder. The bounce rate is calculated as follows:
Bounces : Number of recipients * 100
UNSUBSCRIBE This shows how many recipients unsubscribed after the newsletter was sent and is calculated as follows
Unsubscribes : (number of recipients - bounces) *100
Value optimization
Some simple measures can optimize open rate. The most important content should always be at the beginning of the subject line. Subject lines of 30-50 characters are ideal, as they are displayed in full on mobile devices. Personalized subject lines and action-oriented, exciting sentences also help. A clean address book with no inactive recipients is also important for open rates.
Short, easy-to-understand texts with information that is relevant to recipients help improve click-through rate and CTR. In addition, visually appealing newsletters with powerful, professional images and clearly organized content, as well as eye-catching and well-positioned call-to-action (CTA) buttons, help to optimize this area.
To achieve the lowest possible bounce rate, it is necessary to maintain the address book well to avoid incorrect or duplicate recipients. When it comes to unsubscribe rates, the quality of the address book is also important, in addition to mobile optimization and interesting, trustworthy content. In addition, it can help to change the sending frequency to avoid too high a frequency, for example.
Comparisons from "Click and Open Rates 2018: The big industry benchmark in email marketing"
The company sendinblue has published a study entitled "Click rates and open rates 2018: The big industry benchmark in email marketing". More than 360 million emails were analysed anonymously in order to determine average values across different industries. These can be used as benchmarks and comparisons for newsletter campaigns. Below are the main results and averages for the tourism industry:
CLICK AND OPEN RATES BY CALENDAR WEEK
The study looked at click and open rates by calendar week between October 2017 and February 2018. It was found that the click-through rate is highest in calendar week 48, which is the beginning of the pre-Christmas period. Conversely, the lowest click-through rate was recorded in the penultimate week of the year.
In terms of opening rate, calendar week 47 is the most successful, with the Black Friday and Cyber Monday retail promotions. The opening rate then drops in January and only slowly recovers at the beginning of the Carnival season (from week 5), due to the low propensity to buy after the holidays. It is worth noting that the open rate is very high in week 51, but the click rate is lowest in the same period. This is due to the fact that many Christmas and New Year's greetings are sent during this period, which are often opened and read, but at the same time contain no or very few click targets.
INDUSTRY AVERAGES FOR TRAVEL AND TRANSPORT
The following averages for the Travel & Transport industry were identified in the study and serve as a benchmark for newsletter marketing.
Open rate: 21.45
Click-through rate: 3.52
CTR: 16.43
Unsubscribe rate: 2.32
Bounce rate: 0.41
In comparison, to the cross-industry averages:
Open rate: 26.56
Click-through rate: 4.11
CTR: 15.38
Unsubscribe rate: 3.37
Bounce rate: 0.54
Conclusion
Emotional, professional and targeted newsletters promote customer loyalty and help generate additional purchases. Using metrics and industry benchmarks, it is possible to make a realistic assessment of the success of a hotel's own newsletter campaigns. It is also possible to identify areas for improvement in order to achieve the best possible newsletter marketing results.
