Email Marketing Analytics: How to Measure And Report On Key Metrics
The importance of email marketing has been discussed countless times as part of a good marketing strategy. We could even talk about how to optimize emails and improve them or the common mistakes to avoid. Nonetheless, does any of that truly matter if we don’t know if they are generating any valuable results? Are the email campaigns working as we hoped they would? How can we measure whether the email campaigns are helping in achieving our marketing goals?
While each business has different needs and goals, there are some basic points that almost every business should be tracking with their email campaigns to measure success. Read on to learn more about the metrics you should consider with emails.
Open Rate
The open rate is the percentage of emails opened compared to the total number of emails sent to recipients. Note that this is based only on emails that were delivered and excludes the emails that were sent but were not received by the recipient. The subject line is one of the best ways to improve the open rate of an email as it is one of the first things a recipient sees when they get an email. Open rates are best used as a comparative metric. To illustrate, seeing the difference between last week’s emails and this week’s and seeing if you can modify any variables to improve the open rate.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The CTR is the percentage of people who clicked on one or more links within your email. The more people click links, the better CTR. It is one of the most important metrics to track, which is used to measure the success of your email campaigns. Further, the CTR allows you to calculate the performance of every individual email you send to your recipients.
When a recipient of the email clicks on a link, it tells us they are interested in the content we shared with them. It is an extremely important metric as it also allows us to track which recipients clicked on the link, the number of clicks per link, the number of times someone clicked on a link, the most clicked link in the campaign, and more.
Conversion Rates
The conversion rate is the percentage of people who clicked on a link within an email and completed a desired goal of the email. This could be leading the recipient of the email to fill out a form, sign-up for an event, make direct purchases, download something, and so on. The conversion rate measures the number of people who complete the call-to-action as a percentage of those who received the email. This is yet another important metric as it tells us how successful the email was in achieving its purpose. If the goal of the email campaign is to generate leads, conversation rates tell us how well the campaign did. You can track conversation rates through Google Analytics or other web analytics tools.
If your emails have reasonable open rates and clicks but aren’t generating conversions, you should look at your email campaign and see what can be changed. Ensure the subject lines are well written and the main copy of the email as it plays a significant role in getting customers. Other reasons may also be poorly structured email or landing pages that might make it complex for people to navigate and, therefore, challenging to complete a conversion.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is the number of emails that could not be successfully delivered to a recipient. There are two kinds of bounces. The first one is called “Soft Bounces”, which are emails that couldn’t be delivered because the recipient’s inbox was full or there was an issue with the recipient’s server. On the other hand, “Hard Bounces” are emails sent to addresses that are invalid, no longer exist or closed. You could try to re-send the emails that were soft bounced. However, with hard bounced emails, those addresses should be removed immediately from your mailing list as internet service providers use bounce rates to determine an email sender’s reputation. Too many hard bounce emails make you look like a spammer and therefore should be taken care of immediately.
List Growth Rate
This is the number of subscribers you are adding to your email list. Apart from CTR and conversion rates, you should be aware of the growth or loss of your email list. Ideally, the aim is to grow your list for a larger audience reach and establish your position in your industry as a leader. Unfortunately, there usually is a natural decline in an email marketing list; therefore, more attention needs to be paid to ensuring your subscriber list grows and is at a healthy size.
Unsubscribe List
As important as knowing how much your email list is growing, it is just as important to know how many people are unsubscribing from your email list. Having high numbers of unsubscribers might be a cause for concern. While people often unsubscribe from marketing emails for different reasons, peaks in unsubscribe rates could mean issues with the content that need to be addressed.
Measuring subscriber engagement from CTRs and conversion rates is also important because many people might not unsubscribe from your emails but rather stop opening or reading them altogether. It is therefore essential to be aware of the unengaged subscribers and perhaps later remove them from your mailing list altogether. Although it doesn’t need to be monitored daily, it would be good to keep an eye on it once a month or so to see how your overall mailing list is affected.
Email ROI
This is the Return on Investment (ROI) for your email campaigns. It measures how cost-effective the email campaign was. Calculating the ROI is essential if making a profit is part of an email campaign’s goal. Specifically, how much revenue was made against how much was spent on the campaign. It is essential to know how many leads were generated from the email marketing or the potential or actual revenue that you made. Such information helps you understand how valuable email marketing as a channel is and how it can create tangible results.
In conclusion, you should be thoughtful about which metrics need to be tracked, how you effectively measure every email’s performance, the health of the email list, and whether you can achieve your goals with email marketing. Measuring these metrics of your email campaigns will lead to more effective email marketing. Contact Robotic Marketer to find out how you can integrate email marketing into your marketing strategy.
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