End of 2024 Review – It’s All About Business

Every year we take a look back at the content we have created for our business to do a review to see what’s hitting the right mark with our audience so we know what to create more of next year. And each year we share this in a blog post. Firstly, because you may find it useful and secondly, to show that we practice what we preach.

And what is it that we preach?

That creating regular content and reviewing and planning your content and other website and marketing related activities are important for your business.

So here are our top three email newsletter subject lines from 2024

1. Get your business name right and start some good habits…
   Open rate: 41%
2. Love your business, love your website…
   Open rate: 40.7%
3. 3 amazing business building opportunities…
   Open rate: 39.9%

There are some clear similarities.

All of the titles are talking about business. This year our emails that spoke directly to the reader using “you” didn’t perform as well as those talking about business. This is reflected in the approach that the people we are working with are taking in their business as well. We have started working with more small businesses rather than entrepreneurs with a personal brand and now we have noticed this we can continue to tailor our content.

Also, the ellipses… still seems to do well in subject lines, which we have seen consistently over the last few years. People seem to like the intrigue it creates.

And if you’re wondering whether these are good open rates we did some research so we could tell you.

Email open rates stats to help your own review

If you’ve been reading our annual reviews for a while (2023’s post, 2022s post) you’ll know that we used to say a couple of years ago that email open rates on average were around 20% which you can see in this post from Campaign Monitor but people seem to like email more now. More businesses and organisations use it so people are getting more used to receiving information and marketing in this way and which means email open rates are increasing.

We always used to perform way above the average with our open rates but this post from Mailerlite suggests we are sitting around average for our sector now. In the post you can see the average for your sector to work out how you’re doing.

So, that’s email but we’ve also looked at… (see what I did there? 😀)

Our top three blog posts from 2024

1. 3 Reasons Why Text Shouldn’t be an Image on a Website
2. Finally, I can do what I do best! (And stop worrying about my website.)
3. 8 Things a Great Fitness Website Should Include

As you can see, two of the titles are very similar. It’s clear what you’re going to get from the posts, the number at the start tells you how much info you’re going to get from the post and that it’s likely to be a fairly quick, worthwhile read. And one of our top email subjects follows a similar format.

The post in second position was a guest post by one of our members about her experience of finally getting to a happy place with her website by working with us and we put this post out on the lead up to Black Friday. It’s a more emotive post which seemed to resonate with people considering buying and it was much more sales focused from our perspective rather than the educative style of the other two.

This helps us to see that our audience are happy to see a mixture of content and for our educational posts, we can see this title format works and has done for a little while now.

Thank you for your support this year, we wouldn’t be in business without you!

So, with all that information we can carry on creating content for you which will hopefully help you in your business, give you some useful tips and support your decision making process when it comes to your website.

Thank you for your support over 2024 and we’ve got a feeling 2025 is going to be an even better year!