How’d We Do? Top Email Takeaways from September 2019

November 14, 2019

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Hey! Laura here, Lead Social Media Strategist for Ezra’s ecommerce brand, BOOM! by Cindy Joseph.

Welcome to another episode of Smart Marketer’s new blog series, How’d We Do?

Every month, I’ll be updating you on BOOM!’s latest email marketing campaigns — including strategy, performance and top takeaways — so you can use this data to stay ahead of the latest trends and best practices.

In September’s installment of How’d We Do?, topics include:

Let’s dive right in, starting with a reminder on how we measure success.

Benchmarks: What Makes a Successful Email?

To judge what makes a successful email, it’s important to know that it varies by industry. Since BOOM! by Cindy Joseph is a makeup and cosmetics brand, we use metrics specific to the beauty industry to measure our success:

Email Success Metrics (Beauty Industry)

Open Rate

Click-through Rate

Placed Order Rate

Most of our emails get more than double the industry averages, but we use these numbers to create the following warning signs:

Deliverability Chart

If our emails are beating those averages and falling in the “Good” range of our Deliverability Table, then we’re happy.

Performance: Overall

Before we look at individual emails, we like to look at the overall performance for the month, then compare the important metrics to the benchmarkers above.

As you can see, all of our metrics met or exceeded industry averages.

As for our internal performance standards, everything looks good except for the box in yellow, our Average Daily Open Rate. While 17.7% is well above the 10.8% industry average, we would still like to get that number above 20%.

Takeaway: To lift our open rates, we are going to focus on testing subject lines and email preview text.

Performance: Individual Emails

Now let’s take a closer look at the individual emails. Here’s a breakdown of the 17 emails we sent in September:

(Watch the video above for visual examples of these emails.)

The Bad News

I’ve included all of these emails in this chart, including the subject lines, list segments, and important metrics:

These charts help us track data, spot trends and gives us ideas for split testing.

I’ve highlighted this row in red because it’s a little concerning to me. This email got a 10.6% open rate, which is well below our standard, and a 0.66% clickthrough rate, which is also lower than we would like.

Interestingly, this email also generated $31,464 in revenue, a high amount for the low open rate and clickthrough rate.

This disparity seems to be because of the email segment. We sent this email to our whole list, which is something we don’t often do. Usually, we send our emails to a list of engaged subscribers (people who have opened an email in last 120 days), because sending to an unengaged list results in low numbers like these, which often hurts deliverability.

Takeaway: It’s time to clean up our email list. Every so often, we run a campaign reengages inactive subscribers and removes those that are truly lost from our list. We show you exactly how to do this in our in-depth course, Smart Email Marketing.

The Good News

Looking again a this email chart, here’s what stands out to me as positive. First, this email, which I’ve highlighted in green:

A 25.6% open rate! That’s great, the highest of the month. And all the other metrics look good too.

Looking closer, the high open rate doesn’t surprise me. This email is promoting a giveaway campaign, and who wouldn’t open an email with the subject line, “Who wants free Boom?”

Takeaway: This campaign is doing its job — getting new email opt-ins and keeping our list active — and it generated $12,980 in revenue, even though our goal is to generate opt-ins, not purchasers. We should keep running these campaigns (but not too often).

Here’s another one of our top performing emails:

This time, it’s a blog post with the subject line, “10 Pro-age Ideas for Your Bucket List”.

This email had a high open rate (25.2%), high clickthrough rate (3%), and generated a surprising number of orders for a content email (107).

Takeaway: Clearly, this post resonated with our audience, so we should consider making more content on this topic. Also, we might want to turn this blog post into a pre-sell article.

How’d We Do Overall in September 2019?

We could improve our overall open rates and clickthrough rates, which we plan to do by split testing subject lines and the preview texts of our emails.

Otherwise, I’m happy to say that our campaigns did really well, and I give us a PASS for September.

Watch the video at the top of the page for even more detail on all of these emails, including all of the page templates we use, which are available in Zipify Pages, our sales funnel and landing page builder for Shopify.