Optimizing Your Email Campaign Results: Tips for Maximizing Engagement After You Hit Send
I’m Lindsay Higgins, a former Constant Contact employee and now founder of L2L Creative Group, a Boston-based agency specializing in Constant Contact account setup, ongoing ‘do it for us’ email marketing management, and as-needed email marketing strategy and consulting.
Once you’ve sent out your email, it’s time to assess its performance to ensure you’re getting the most out of your campaign. But before diving into metrics, let’s go back to thinking about your initial goal for the campaign. This is a chance to revisit those Week 1 goals you set! Were you looking to track event attendance? Were you aiming to get more phone calls or website submissions? How were you planning to measure the results—by the number of phone calls received for a specific product or service? Remember, don’t just measure online results, but offline ones too!
By keeping your goals front and center, you’ll not only measure performance accurately but also gather actionable insights to refine your strategy moving forward.
Analyze Your Email Metrics
Start by reviewing key email performance metrics:
- Open Rate: Indicates how many recipients opened your email. A low open rate may signal an ineffective subject line or delivery issues.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): This shows how many people clicked on links within your email. It’s a good measure of engagement and interest in your content.
- Bounce Rate: This tells you how many emails were undeliverable. High bounce rates could indicate issues with your list quality.
- Unsubscribe Rate: If you see a spike in unsubscribes, it could mean your content wasn’t relevant or engaging.
Curious about how your metrics stack up against industry standards? Check out average industry rates for a comparison.
Optimizing your Metrics
Resend to Non-Openers
One of the easiest ways to increase engagement is by resending the same email to people who didn’t open it the first time - because sometimes people miss that first email. Simply tweak the subject line to make it more enticing or time your resend when your audience is more likely to check their inbox. Resending can help capture attention from those who may have missed your email initially.
Segment Your Audience
By segmenting your contact list based on factors like demographics, behavior, or past interactions, you can send more personalized emails. Tailoring content to specific groups of subscribers increases the likelihood of opens, clicks, and conversions. For example, send one version to new subscribers and a different version to long-time customers.
A more illustrative example would be; imagine you operate a bakery. If you want to get new subscribers familiar with your business, you could send an email that highlights the different baked goods you sell. If you are trying to entice long-term customers back, you could send an email with a promotional offer (e.g. Buy One, Get One).
Use A/B Subject Line Testing
If you’re unsure which subject lines will perform best, run A/B tests. This feature lets you send the same email but with different subject lines to small portions of your list to see which one performs better in terms of opens and clicks. Then, the winning version gets sent to the rest of your list. Any easy test to run is to see if adding an emoji gets you more opens.
Monitor Timing and Frequency
Timing matters! Analyze when your audience is most active online and try sending your campaigns during those peak engagement windows. For instance, if you’re a school administrator and sending a PTA (Parent/Teacher Association) newsletter to parents, you wouldn’t send it during peak drop-off time, but you could send it earlier in the morning when parents might be haggardly looking through their emails while the kids throw breakfast at each other. Alternatively, you could send the email in the evening, after the kids have presumably gone to bed, where parents might be taking a step back and catching up on anything they’ve missed from the day. Regardless of when you send it, it’s not guaranteed they’ll see it – which is where Resend to Non-Openers comes in handy.
Remember to balance your email frequency to maintain engagement without overwhelming your audience. We recommend sending at least once a week or twice a month to remain relevant.
Improve Future Campaigns with Reporting Insights
Set aside time each month to do a deep dive into your reports. Track trends in opens, clicks, and conversions over time to understand what resonates with your audience. Are specific types of content, calls-to-action, or product categories performing better? Use these insights to refine future email strategies.
Optimizing your email campaign doesn’t stop after you hit send. By analyzing performance, revisiting your initial campaign goals, segmenting your audience, resending to non-openers, and leveraging insights from reporting, you can continually refine your strategy to maximize both online and offline engagement and results.
Your Assignments
- First, add your industry to your account for more accurate comparison data for your industry.
- Fill out the worksheet and compare your Week 1 stats with your Week 5 stats, then share it in this thread.
- Compare your stats with the averages for your industry.
How you’ll earn your badge
Fill out the worksheet with your Week 1 metrics and your Week 5 metrics and compare the difference! Then, share your worksheet in a reply below.
Resources
- Handout: Reporting eBook
- Blog: How to Interpret Your Email Marketing Reporting
- Community: Q&A: Master Your Digital Marketing Metrics
Lindsay Higgins L2L Creative Group, Inc. Help others find this post by giving it kudos. Note: I am not a Constant Contact employee. |  |
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Compared to the overall industry results for Financial Services, we are doing well. Our open and click rates are in the industry range, and our bounce rate is lower than the industry range. So, I was pleasantly surprised.
@JenniferS7 This is great, especially for the financial services industry!
Lindsay Higgins L2L Creative Group, Inc. Help others find this post by giving it kudos. Note: I am not a Constant Contact employee. | |
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@KCSL You are spot on with your analysis of the reporting! The difference in list and type of content included (1 video vs. non-video) definitely could have affected the click rate. I'd also be curious to analyze the email subject lines to compare those and see if one piqued more curiosity than the other and the time of day and day of the week it was sent.
Lindsay Higgins L2L Creative Group, Inc. Help others find this post by giving it kudos. Note: I am not a Constant Contact employee. | |
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Hi @RitaP
If you've already put in your industry but still can't see the comparison numbers, it might just be a problem with how it's showing up on our system. Sometimes it takes a bit for the industry stats to show up, or there could be a little hiccup. Just make sure your industry is saved correctly in your profile. Give us a heads-up if it’s still not working by the end of the day.
For this challenge, the deal is to check out the emails you sent in Week 1 and compare them with the ones you sent in Week 5. We're not looking at the same email being resent over and over, but rather seeing how two different campaigns did in terms of performance (one from Week 1 and one from Week 5).
If you need more time to get good results from your sent emails (since emails can take a while to settle), no problem! You can still check out the first results and use them to see any patterns or changes you might want to make for the future.
Does that make sense? Just let me know if you need more info!
Elevate your marketing with Constant Contact's Professional Design Services! From eye-catching email templates to custom branding and social media graphics, our professional design services are tailored to boost your business's impact and engagement. |  |
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Glad to hear, keep us posted!
Elevate your marketing with Constant Contact's Professional Design Services! From eye-catching email templates to custom branding and social media graphics, our professional design services are tailored to boost your business's impact and engagement. | |
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You are not the only one confused! So I am hoping for an answer soon. Comparing one campaign to it's self is probably the right answer and the easiest to determine metrics. I received the "invite" as a "new" constant contact user, and understood it to be a fun tutorial for how to use CC (which I thought was stellar marketing by the way). But, I hit the ground running and have been implementing each week's lessons on multiple campaigns. Using the same data on each campaign to it's self is letting me know which campaigns are gathering more attention and helping me know when to send out which type of marketing (tree farm photos advertised in September got a better response than the same ad the last week in October). Overall good information and makes CC a valuable resource for this reason 
We are a non-profit, faith-based organization, specially a church. I have now added our industry to our page.
Faith-Based Industry: 41.30% (open) 2.55% (click) 9.01% bounce
Our open rate is excellent and usually increases with specific, targeted messages than a blast with many items (not just mine, but a few I looked at in our history - this is true for every department). Children/Youth emails continue to be the most opened emails compared to other departments.
We try not to send too many emails, about one email a week per department with another one that includes almost everything. An extra email may be sent out to highlight one specific event/initiative/memorial/service/etc...I think our above industry average open-rate shows that our congregation members trust us.
A new goal of mine would be to look at who is a consistent non-opener and reach out. - is there a Constant Contact metric for that? If there was an alert like: "This person has received 20 emails without opening them...maybe they should be removed from the list?"
Click-rate is down (but this is just 48 hours later...I hope that will change - the event itself just may not work for families and is a week away). Now that I see the industry average (2.55%) my goal is to exceed that; However, that industry percentage makes me feel MUCH better about people not clicking/signing up for things. My click-rate hovers around 3-10%
Bounce Rate: I was able to do a little data maintenance for the bounces which is now 0. Very rarely to we get an "unsubscribe" and our communication person reaches out when that happens. I would like to see if those "consistent non-openers" should really be unsubscribed manually.
These weeks have helped me a lot with learning the CC platform without me needed to blindly look into things. I will share my new knowledge THANK YOU!
Well, well, well, look who's the expert now! @YouthMinistry222 your response is so thorough, you've clearly done your homework. I’m glad to hear the weekly challenge has helped you learn about our platform!
Elevate your marketing with Constant Contact's Professional Design Services! From eye-catching email templates to custom branding and social media graphics, our professional design services are tailored to boost your business's impact and engagement. | |
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Hi @YouthMinistry222 !
It sounds like you're doing a fantastic job with your email strategy, and your open rate is definitely something to be proud of—41.30% is well above industry averages, especially for faith-based organizations. Targeting specific segments and sending relevant messages (like the success of Children/Youth emails) is a proven way to keep engagement high, and your approach is clearly resonating with your congregation.
For tracking consistent non-openers, Constant Contact doesn’t have an automatic alert for non-engaged recipients, but you can segment these contacts manually using their engagement metrics. You can create a list of people who haven’t opened, say, the last 10 emails. Once you have that group, consider sending a “We Miss You” re-engagement campaign before removing them. Something like:
“We noticed you haven’t opened our emails lately. Is there something we could do differently, or would you prefer fewer updates? Let us know!”
you could even include a survey. This could prompt re-engagement, and if they continue not to respond, you could consider manually removing them. A clean, engaged list is better for long-term deliverability and engagement, so it’s great you’re thinking about this.
It’s normal for click-through rates to fluctuate, especially with time-sensitive events. Your current click-rate (3-10%) is a solid range—especially since faith-based emails often focus more on information-sharing than actionable clicks. You might experiment with making calls-to-action more prominent or testing different link formats, like buttons vs. hyperlinked text, to see what resonates best.
To exceed the industry click rate, it might help to provide options within the email. For example, instead of just one main event to sign up for, include a second or third related option (“Can’t attend? Join us in spirit through X” or “Looking for ways to help? Volunteer for Y”). This can appeal to a broader group while boosting your click-through rate.
It sounds like you're using Constant Contact to its full potential, and with the thoughtful data maintenance and engagement strategies you’re working on, I’m sure you’ll continue to see excellent results!
Lindsay Higgins L2L Creative Group, Inc. Help others find this post by giving it kudos. Note: I am not a Constant Contact employee. | |
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Hi @user98333 ! Don't be discouraged, it's all about testing. Some things to consider: what day/time did you send email #1 compared to email #2? What was the subject line for each? If the email was just sent out, giving it some time to propagate might make sense. 😃
Lindsay Higgins L2L Creative Group, Inc. Help others find this post by giving it kudos. Note: I am not a Constant Contact employee. | |
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(Just a note.....your insert doesn't include .pdf files which is the default way that your form saved when i downloaded it.)
Our metrics are pretty consistent with an open rate slightly above 30%. Been a weird year for retail so we are trying a lot of new events this year.
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