It’s an exciting time when trying something new. It is normally tinged with a bit of self-doubt; after all, what if you make a mess of it? A reassuring aspect of starting out in email marketing is that there is lots of advice and help out there, both online and from your email marketing service providers. 

They will have told you how easy it is, because it is. Yet when you receive the returns from your first email marketing campaigns and they are a disappointment, you might feel it is all beyond you.

You will probably have a fairly small email marketing list so it is unlikely you will have been able to target your campaign with precision. Further, you are new to them, and they to you, so there will be a degree of reluctance on their behalf to trust you. On top of that, you will have little information on your subscribers.

In other words, your returns should be measured against others starting up. Your open rate might have been poor compared to those of the big email marketing companies, but pretty good for someone of your expertise. You now have much more data on your subscribers and it is behavioural, the best there is.

Your next campaign will be different, as it will take into account the new data. For instance, there will be those who failed to open the email. This is not as bad as it seems. Experiment by changing the Subject Line, or perhaps the timing of the send. Is there any improvement?

Those who clicked through to a landing page but failed to complete show that you need to look at the design of that page. Those who opened the email but failed to do anything else are more problematical. 

Is there anything they have in common such as, for instance, the way they subscribed to your email marketing list? If so, they can be put in their own group. 

In other words, something useful always comes from a campaign. Don’t reject the data just because you didn’t sell as much as you expected. What you’ve now got is hard-earned data.