Personal Blog

Email marketing

Email Overview
Constant Contact Report

How frustrating is it to discover your email marketing database is not as clean and tidy as you thought? I manage Marketing for a Datacom Distribution business in the Middle Atlantic region. In trying to improve personalization of the email marketing campaigns sent out over time, I found room for improvement. A lot of room. The marketing platform used is Constant Contact, however I believe my experience is true across other platforms to some degree.

I discovered sending generic campaigns to large numbers of contacts can cloud results. I looked at 2019 results and seeing an open rate of 19% seemed excellent on the surface. According to Constant Contact it is 11% higher than the industry average. Without thinking it through it looks like a fabulous result. Looking at it from a different angle the unopened rate is 81%. Who are these people?

Using the Segment tool in Constant Contact I was able to identify the 12,705 contacts who were sent an email in 2019. Of course, most of these contacts were sent more than one email. How many people opened none of those emails in 2019? Using the same tool, I identified 5,393 contacts who opened no emails. That is almost 43%. Although I really should know better the result was shocking.

Using other tools in the platform I have since moved the contacts who never open an email into a new list. As new results are available, I will update the stats.