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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