by:
kaburke
.png "HubSpot Employee")
In the last year, we released an ‘Overall Email Health’ section within the marketing email product which is one of my favourite reporting tools. This tool allows you to review key metrics of your marketing email performance from a high level so that you can identify areas which require improvement. In this article, I am going to go through each of the metrics, my top tip to improve each of the scores and at the end you will have some of your own investigating to do to make sure you got it!
First however I am going to share the GOLDEN rule of maintaining a great email health score…
The secret?
Send emails to people that are expecting to hear from you
The old saying of “Throw enough mud at the wall, some of it will stick” is a good way of looking at sending emails to purchased contacts. If you buy lists and send out emails to thousands of contacts, you may get lucky and get a few relevant people, but email providers are going to punish you for throwing mud in the first place. The more mud you throw, the cleverer the email provider gets at protecting their wall. Also it’s against the terms of service for HubSpot which is an industry standard. Here are examples from MailChimp, Marketo and Pardot to name a few… we are all not trying to ruin your business but actually want to protect your sending reputation.
Trust me, I know about this all too well. My name is Katie Burke and the HubSpot CPO is also named Katie Burke. My email is definitely on some list selling platform as Katie Burke our CPO so essentially I am constantly the bird…..
Find the email health tool in your account at https://app.hubspot.com/email/[PORTAL_ID]/health?breakdown=MAIN
Click-Through Score
What is it?
“Click-through rate is the percentage of people who clicked a link in your email out of those who opened your email.”
Why is it important?
Engagement with the content of an email shows the email providers that this is content that people are interested in. If you get an email that is not relevant to you or you are not interested in, you may open it but once you see the content is uninteresting to you the likelihood is that you will continue about your day without clicking to view the content.
How does it work?
When you click on an email link, tracking parameters are added to the link that are unique to the email and the contact. When you link to a HubSpot tracked page, that means that when the HubSpot tracking code sees the unique parameters it is able to translate that X contact from email Y is now looking at page Z.
My Top Recommendation to improve this score?
- Send to people expecting to hear from you.
- Questions to ask yourself:
- Is this email actually worth sending? Does it add value to my contact?
- Are all the contacts that are being sent this definitely interested in this content?
More articles on this:
- How to Improve Email Clickthrough Rate by 583%
- 11 Sure-Fire Ways to Increase Email Click-Through Rates
- How to Improve Your Email Clickthrough Rate [Video]
Hard Bounce Rate
What is it?
“A hard bounce rate is the percentage of emails that couldn’t be delivered because the email address was invalid or no longer in use, or your email was marked as spam by the recipient’s email server.”
Why is it important?
A bad hard bounce rate is a good indication for email providers that you do not have good list hygiene. Why are you sending to so many contacts that no longer exist? Why are you trying to send to the contact who already hard bounced before?
How does it work?
When an email is sent from HubSpot, the receiver inbox will send back a response to let us know whether the email has been accepted or not. If the response is coming back as a hard bounce we know that this hasn't been delivered for a range of reasons.
My Top Recommendation to improve this score?
- Create an email sunset policy to make sure that you have good list hygiene and send to people expecting to hear from you.
- Questions to ask yourself:
- Are the contacts on this list all contacts that I have had some form of contact with in the past few months?
More articles on this:
- Email bounce types
- Delete contacts that hard bounced on marketing emails
- Clean up your contact lists to improve email deliverability
- 3 Reasons to Practice Good Email List Hygiene
- 4 Tips to Keep Your Email List Squeaky Clean
Open Rate
What is it?
“Open rate is the percentage of recipients who opened your email out of those who were delivered your email.”
Why is it important?
Inbox providers want to bring relevant emails into their users main inbox. If they see that emails from you are not getting opened by recipients, they see your content as not relevant and will put you somewhere else - like the promotions tab, spam, junk etc.
How does it work?
When you send an email from HubSpot, we put a tiny pixel image that when loaded pings our server to let us know that email X is being viewed by contact Y. If the image is not loaded, we can’t see that the email was opened. Or, if the email is forwarded to multiple people it may look like the person has opened it many times.
My Top Recommendation to improve this score?
- Send to people expecting to hear from you. “Oh but Katie I want to send this email to let them know about our new product!” No! Do your due diligence first. Leverage other forms of marketing, such as targeted lists in Google ads, to promote the new products. Once you get the engagement that shows their interest, then and only then should you send an email promoting the new product.
- Ask yourself if this person will go looking for your email.
More articles on this:
- Email Open Rates By Industry (& Other Top Email Benchmarks)
- 23 Simple Email Marketing Tips to Improve Your Open and Clickthrough Rates
Unsubscribe Rate
What is it?
“Unsubscribe rate is the percentage of people who unsubscribed out of those who were delivered your email.”
Why is it important?
A high unsubscribe rate means that your content is not applicable to the end user and they don’t want to hear from you any more. If the unsubscribe rate snowballs, this lets the email providers know that you are not reacting to how people are engaging with your content.
How does it work?
When a contact unsubscribes, this is done through our subscription pages so it allows us to be compliant with CAN-SPAM laws that say all contacts must have the ability to unsubscribe from emails.
My Top Recommendation to improve this score?
- Send to people expecting to hear from you. Are you starting to see a theme?
More articles on this:
- 9 Ways to Dramatically Reduce Email Unsubscribe Rates
- Why Consumers Subscribe and Unsubscribe from Email [New Data]
- Database Decay Simulation
SPAM Report Rate
What is it?
“Spam report rate is the percentage of people who marked an email as spam out of those who were delivered your email. Not all inbox providers give information about when a contact marks an email as spam in their inbox.”
Why is it important?
This is how the user tells the email provider user that this email is SPAM. This is important as if enough people are not engaging with your content and also marking you as SPAM that will be problematic.
How does it work?
The user will mark the email as SPAM in their inbox and the information can get fed back to HubSpot from the email provider.
My Top Recommendation to improve this score?
- Send to people expecting to hear from you.
More articles on this:
With our new knowledge, let’s practice!
In the below table the colours correspond to the HubSpot Standards - is the Score above or below the HubSpot average?
- Red - danger area
- Yellow - struggle town
- Green - looking good
Grab and pen and paper and answer the below questions yourself before scrolling for the answers!
Question time:
- Which portal out of these 3, is least likely to be marked as SPAM?
- Which portal out of these 3, looks to have contacts from a dubious source?
- Which portal out of these 3, has an issue with email content?
- Which portal out of these 3, is more likely to be going directly into the trash?
Answers:
- Which portal out of these 3, is least likely to be marked as SPAM?
- Portal B - while their SPAM report is not in a great place overall their emails are performing really well.
- Which portal out of these 3, looks to have contacts from a dubious source?
- Portal A - this portal has no SPAM complaints so why did I choose this one? There is no way for us to tell where emails are being placed but the open rate gives us a good indication of whether the emails are getting in front of people. While there are no SPAM complaints, the fact that the open rate is so bad tells me that this might be because the emails are going directly into the SPAM folder. No one is going to mark them as SPAM if they don't see the emails. Coupled with a not great unsubscribe rate and a not great hard bounce score this portal is most likely using a third party list or doesn’t have good list hygiene.
- Which portal out of these 3, has an issue with email content?
- Portal C - look at that gorgeous open rate but terrible click-through rate. This tells us that people want your emails and are engaged but when they open the email there is nothing for them to engage with. You want the email to add value but also entice the contact to view other relevant content. You have them engaged, try to get them to do something while you have their attention. Ever gone down a YouTube hole? You want your users to go down a content hole of your making!
- Which portal out of these 3, is more likely to be going directly into the trash?
- Portal A - if these figures are consistent with each email send, then the account is teaching the email providers that they are throwing lots of mud and the email providers are less likely to put these emails into the inboxes of their users.
Disagree with any of my observations, comment below and give me your two cents!
*this is not an actual fact
You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in. Otherwise, register and sign in.