Email marketing is a sleeper hit when it comes to conversions. Let’s walk through how popular it is, what it is, and how to use new tools to further refine your results and convert customers.

Get With The Game

An overwhelming 95% of companies that engage in marketing automation also leverage the power of email marketing, according to a study by Regalix.

As further proof, some of the biggest companies and startups like DropBox, Postmates, Buzzfeed and Uber have leveraged email marketing to appeal to a massive audience. Better yet, the campaigns are automated, so once the architecture’s in place, there’s little in the way for the company or managers to do besides sit back, relax, and watch their customer engagement grow.

If you’re not taking advantage of email marketing right now as a content marketer, you’re doing it completely wrong.

The Rundown

Pretend now that you’re not a large multinational corporation, but just blogger or content marketer. Well, having a segmented lists of people you can send automated emails to still impacts your career and general recognition greatly. Head on over to MailChimp or a similar site if you haven’t already started plans for marketing automation.

So you’ve created your mailing list on MailChimp or whatever platform’s popular nowadays with content marketers and bloggers. The stuff you write is gaining traction and you notice that your email list is actually beginning to fill up with a lot of people. You’re left with a problem – how do further increase retention and build a community around my content now that I have a bunch of people who I know are interested.

The Email Open Rate

The email open rate is exactly what it sounds like, it’s the proportion of people that open your emails in comparison to the proportion of people that don’t even receive those emails either because they’ve bounced, gone into spam, or been ignored. So it’s basically a percentage or statistic like one in every three people who get an email from you open it up.

Let’s expand on the topic a little bit. Why is the email open rate even important to begin with? Well, its a direct measure of engagement between your customer and the message you’re sending them about your product or service through their subscription to you. It’s the answer to the question that most people want to know from their customers, “Who cares ? ”

The Click Through Rate and Organic Visibility

The click through rate, or CTR for short, measures how many people start clicking on links and similar things that lead to landing pages or other blogs after opening your email.

CTRs are related to a lot of things, including how Google might rank SEO results organically. So they’re important. Check out this detailed breakdown by Moz’s Rand Fishkin regarding the relationship between the CTR and the organic traffic generated from higher rankings. Google is actively monitoring and collecting time-based aspects of user behavior when it comes to CTR as part of a strategy to determine what’s relevant, apparently.