American Lifestyle’s digital edition is a monthly email of your digital publication that we send directly to your clients’ inboxes. One of the features that we offer clients is access to their email analytics. But, how do you know if your digital edition is performing well?

On this episode of Above the Noise, brand content manager, Jessica Carlin breaks down four popular metrics used in the email marketing world.

Video Transcription

If you don’t know about the American Lifestyle digital edition, it’s an email that we send monthly with a digital publication to your clients inboxes. It has beautiful documentary style features, recipe videos, and interactive content. Not only can you email the digital edition, but you can also text it and share it on social media. Majority of the questions that we get on the digital edition is how to read the analytics and also if it’s good or bad in the world of email marketing.

Bounces

So the first thing I want to go over is bounces. There’s two types of bounces, a soft bounce and a hard bounce.

A soft bounce is a temporary email delivery issue. That’s something like the email inbox is full, there was a server error, or the email is too large for the inbox. We’ll actually send soft bounces again so you don’t have to worry about those.

A hard bounce is actually a permanent email issue. It means the email address is no longer valid, or the server domain is no longer active. Don’t worry about those emails we won’t send them out anymore. The one thing you do need to make sure is that you clean your email list on a regular basis so all of those hard bounces you actually want to reach out to those clients and see if you can get a new email address. Also, make sure to not buy email lists because those emails are usually kind of unreliable.

Open rates

Next is open rates. Open rates are figured out by dividing the number of emails opened only once by the number of emails delivered. Delivered is the number of sent emails minus the number of bounces. The industry average for open rates is 17.8% so anywhere between ten and 20% we consider successful.

Click through rates

Then there’s click through rates. Click through rates are figured out by the number of emails clicked over the number of emails delivered. This is also emails that are only clicked once. The industry standard for click through rates is actually only 1.92% so anything around 2% we consider successful.

Unsubscribes

Another stat that you might see is unsubscribes. Every email that we send has an unsubscribe link. If your client no longer wants to receive that email they’ll unsubscribe from it which means we’ll no longer send the email to them.

The takeaway

So now that you understand email analytics a little bit better the one thing I want to stress is consistency. After you send out your campaign, look at your stats, but definitely don’t give up. Think about your email inbox and how many emails you get every single day. Eventually your clients will come to expect the great content that you’re sending to them on a monthly basis.

I’m actually going to include a download of our newest digital edition success guide in the notes below. This is going to have a lot of the information that I covered today, plus other ways that you can customize your digital publication.

If you like these tips, subscribe to our YouTube channel, check us out on Facebook and Instagram, but most importantly take action on this today.