Email Subject Lines & Data Benchmarks
Email marketing seems like a cut-and-dry marketing experience. Write an email and send it to your customers, right? Not exactly. While it seems easy to drive an email marketing strategy, understanding your goals, industry standards for open and click rates, and ensuring your customers are actually engaging with your Farms’ emails are all keys to a successful email strategy.
While many email marketing terms may be new for you, this blog will explain how your Farm business can increase open rates with subject lines that prompt engagement and surpass industry benchmarks (or benchmarks you layout for yourself!).
What are Benchmarks?
A benchmark is an industry standard that you can use to compare your Farm’s business performance compared to businesses in a similar industry. Comparing your email campaigns to these benchmarks allows you to see where your marketing strategies are succeeding and where you may need to focus your efforts to drive improvement.
In the case of farming, the industry standard for email benchmarks are as follows: 24% open rate and 2.6% click-through rate (CTR). If you notice that you have no CTR, make sure to include clickable links for customers to follow. We recommend adding product recommendations and links to your social channels (Instagram and Facebook).
To fuel your CTR, be sure your email marketing strategy is focused on getting more customers to open your emails – also known as the open rate. If you notice your open rate is low compared to the industry standard, one way to fix that is with catchy subject lines.
Drive Email Opens with a Catchy Subject Line
If you’re spending time writing emails to drive purchases to your Farm – then ideally, you want your customers to open them, right? The key to meeting (and surpassing!) email benchmarks for your industry and optimizing your email marketing strategy is to have people open and engage with your emails. How will they visit your Farm store or browse your inventory if they don’t open your emails? Adjusting your subject line is the best place to start if you're looking to increase your Open Rate. Your customers get bombarded with emails all day, every day. The key is to have your Farm stand out in the inbox.
Here are four (4) tips for drafting a subject line that prompts opens:
Personalize It:
Including someone’s name or location has been shown to increase open rates and drive higher click-through rates for an email. Try adding the first name to your subject line to make it more personal and less like a general email. Email marketing tools like Mailchimp make it easy to insert “personalization tokens” that will automatically add first or last names, locations, etc., into your subject lines when you want. Try subject lines like:
[Firstname], we think you’d like these products!
Here’s what’s new on the Farm, [Firstname]
Be Creative & Descriptive:
Subject lines are meant to give a glimpse of what’s inside the email. This is why your subject line should include what readers can expect without giving too much away. Remember to get creative. If you see a subject line in your own inbox that catches your attention, jot it down and customize it as your own! Here are a few creative & descriptive subject lines:
These new products are un–beet–able
Give the gift of local Food this year!
Keep Subject Lines Short & Sweet:
As a gateway into your email, subject lines should be at most 60 characters (not words!). Try keeping subject lines to a minimum of 9 words and limiting punctuation. Longer subject lines or those filled with punctuation end up looking like spam, so customers are reluctant to click on them. Consider these:
Where’s the beef? 🤠
It’s your last chance
Limit Your Emoji Usage:
Emojis are fun, but too many can be off-putting. Limit yourself to one emoji in the subject line, and never substitute an emoji for a word. While it looks nice, the meaning can be lost for some customers who may be unfamiliar with an emoji. Remember, emojis look different with different operating systems (Apple, Google, or Microsoft), so test the emojis or use generic ones that every system would have. Try these:
Got milk? 🥛
Kick your feet up and place an order! 🤗
While all these tips are useful, it’s best to use an email marketing tool to optimize your email marketing efforts. 1000s of Farmers use the Barn2Door + Mailchimp integration to manage their emails, draft strong subject lines, and compare how their emails line up with the benchmark. In fact, Farmers leveraging the Barn2Door + Mailchimp integration drive an average increase of +30% in sales and have been known to drive +80% of weekly orders through a single newsletter.
Mailchimp builds out custom benchmarks for your Farm when you create an account, as all small businesses are different. By using the industry standard, audience demographics, and audience size, you can see how your Farm compares to your peers who use Mailchimp. These customized benchmarks can help you build a strong email strategy and generate sales. Lastly, Mailchimp includes A/B testing and allows you to view how your recent subject lines perform to truly see what your audience wants to read.
With these tools under your belt, you can build a strong email marketing strategy, meet and surpass your benchmarks, and drive consistent sales through email – with minimal effort.
Barn2Door provides an all-in-one solution to grow and manage your Farm business. If you’re curious to learn why successful Farms run on Barn2Door, watch this 5-minute video.