Understand how your email campaign is performing

How do I know if my email campaigns are performing well or not? How do I increase my response rate?

When you run cold email campaigns there are always a lot of factors that influence your results and I have to admit it takes some time and work to figure it out and understand what you need to change in order to increase your results.

Based on my observations and my constant desire to organize things I have built a framework on how to analyze cold email campaigns.

Feel free to steal this framework to analyze your campaigns and build a plan for your next outbound efforts.

Let’s get started!

The very first thing you should check is where your emails are landing. If they’re going into spam you can stop your review after this step. Everything else doesn’t matter until you actually reach the inbox of your prospects.

So how are we checking it?

1. Check your open rate: a healthy open rate is 50% and higher.

• If it is lower, run a test with https://glockapps.com/inbox-email-tester/ and see where your emails are landing. If you’re landing in spam: the easiest and fastest way to solve this is to buy a new domain and warm up a new email account.
• If the test shows that you’re landing in the inbox but your open rate is low: consider another subject line and the beginning of your email. Most likely it doesn’t raise the prospect's interest at this time.

2. Check your bounce rate - it should be lower than 5%.

• If it is higher - review the quality of your list. I recommend running an email verification before uploading your list into your campaigns. Even if you got the list from a source that includes verification. Upload only verified emails to your campaigns.

Next up is the template review. We need to understand how prospects are reacting to our email templates. The more campaigns and data you have the better. In general, cold email campaigns across all industries have an average reply rate of 5-10%. If you run a campaign with highly targeted or hand picked prospects you should aim for a minimum of 15% reply rate.

1. If you had several campaigns, compare the response rate and positive responses rate across all campaigns.

• The campaign with the highest response rate should serve you as a base for your next campaigns. However, it is important to understand why this campaign got better results than the others.
• If you have a campaign with a high response rate but low positive response rate you should read the answers and take notes why people are not interested. Ideally, you should reach out to them, be upfront and see if they can provide some feedback. You can leverage LinkedIn for this.

2. Read through all your responses and make sure to capture the feedback.

1. Collect all positive responses in a table and check if you see common traits. Do the same with prospects who say they’re not a fit etc. This should give you a better understanding about your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

If the reply rate is lower than 5% review your templates based on the following questions:

1. Is the template client focused or you focused? It should be client focused and should solve customer pain points rather than showing how great you are.
2. Is your offer clear?
3. What is your Call to Action (CTA)? It should be clear and should be easily answered with a yes/no.
4. Do you have follow ups in your sequence? Add at least 2 follow ups to your initial email.
5. Are you providing some value upfront?
6. Is your message adjusted for the title persona? For example, the person who would use your tool is not the decision maker. This person should be approached with a message about how the tool would solve some problems in their day-to-day. The decision maker should be approached how the tool would bring them faster to their end goal (or how it would save money, bring ROI etc.).

?Finally, review your list of prospects. You might have a great message, but it’s also important to send them to the right people.

1. Check if your list doesn’t include people with irrelevant titles or irrelevant companies. Oftentimes, you can download a list within a specific function. For example, “marketing department”. However, this is very generic and if you’re going after the “ecommerce growth manager” you would also get an “event manager” and a “marketing copywriter” who are probably not your audience. I recommend going for specific title keywords and reviewing the final list before loading it into the email sending tool.
2. If you’re targeting different functions within one company (ie. CEO, CFO and COO) split them into different categories and load them into separate campaigns to see which one is performing best.
3. If you include the company name in your email templates (ie. Impressed how {{company}} has grown over the last year.) you should make sure the company names are adjusted so that they fit into the template. Remove all extensions (LLC, Inc, Group etc.), CAPS, locations and descriptions that are added to the company name.
4. Make sure that you have only valid emails. The emails should be business emails and should belong to a specific person (avoid info@, support@ …).

Those are some general items I would review to understand how my campaign is doing and what I should do next to increase my numbers with the next campaign.

I would suggest running at least 2-3 different campaigns before doing this review. That way you'll be able to compare them and understand what's working and what's not. Be creative with your cold outreach, try different angles, creative approaches, various offers and don’t be scared! The most important part is to be consistent and disciplined :)

PS. If you think you might need help with the review you can also hire me to perform a campaign audit for you and build an action plan to improve your email campaign results. Just send me a dm or book a call here calendly.com/oleksandra/30min.