Have you tried email marketing severally without success? Do you know the email marketing metrics that drive the needle in your business?
There is a popular saying that you can’t handle what you don’t know. That is a fact in email marketing. To excel in email marketing, you have to know your email marketing metrics and how you can tweak them to improve your success.
After a few emails that receive no engagement, plenty of marketers label their activity as ineffective. That’s one of the biggest mistakes you can make right now, as email marketing is one of the most productive communication channels that allows brands to shape relationships with their customers.
If you stick with me, I will show you the email marketing metrics that bring the most results to your campaigns. And how you can work on them to improve your overall performance.
But before we go right into that, let’s understand what email marketing metrics are all about.
What Are Email Marketing Metrics?
Email marketing metrics are those key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can use to track the success of your email campaigns.
With them, you know very well how your emails are performing and what to do to improve them. There are established email marketing metrics formulas you will learn here.
How to Get Email Marketing Metrics
To get your email marketing metrics, simply go to the email metric dashboard of your email marketing software.
You can customize your dashboard to show the exact metrics you want to track. The dashboard of an ecommerce business would obviously be different from that of digital marketing business. This is because both companies have different metrics that are important to them.
How to Measure Email Marketing Metrics
Most email metrics are calculated by taking the total number of subscribers who took a specific action and dividing it by the total number of emails sent.
For instance, the clickthrough rate is calculated by dividing the total number of unique clicks by the total number of emails delivered and multiplying with 100.
Most Important Email Marketing Metrics You Should Focus On
Here are the most important email marketing metrics that can move your business to the next level:
- Open rate
- Clickthrough rate
- Conversion rate
- Bounce rate
- Unsubscribe rate
- Spam complaint rate
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How to Improve Email Marketing Metrics
Open Rate
You can’t achieve your email marketing goals if your emails don’t get opened. This is one of the most important KPIs you should keep a close eye on.
So, this metric tells you how many emails were opened amongst the total emails you sent out.
If the open rate is low, you must improve it by focusing on your subject lines, sender address, and email preheader.
These three properties’ role is to get people to open your emails. So if people are not opening your emails, something is wrong with one of them.
To sort this out, run A/B tests on the subject lines of your emails. This means that you resend the exact email that didn’t do well, but this time, with a different subject line. Then you check how both campaigns will perform.
You should also customize your sender address to look more personal. People are likely to open your emails if they look like a real person sent them, not some robots somewhere.
At the same time, your email preheader should be catchy enough to draw attention. A single interesting and curiosity-driven sentence can be the secret to a massive email open rate.
Click through Rate
This is the measure of the number of unique clicks on your emails compared to the number of people who saw that email.
In this case, your call-to-action (CTA) and email content are key parameters.
To improve this metric, ensure your subscribers are well segmented. People won’t click on links that do not address them directly.
You should also ensure that your contents are interactive, important, and compelling. Most importantly, your call to action should be strong enough.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is the most important KPI. Conversion is said to have been made only when a contact has completed the desired action. If what you want from your contacts is to download a document, sign up for an event or sign up for your newsletters, a conversion has occurred once that is done.
Improving this metric will require you to have an irresistible offer. If your contacts perceive your offer to be a huge steal, that is if you make them believe the value they are getting is far greater than what they are paying. They will most likely grab it before it eludes them.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the number of contacts who didn’t receive your emails due to invalid emails or their inbox being full.
If your bounce rate is high, your reputation is at risk. There are soft and hard bounces. Soft bounces result when your contact’s mailbox is filled up. While hard bounce results due to invalid email addresses.
To improve this metric, remove hard bounce addresses from your email list as soon as possible. Also, use professional email addresses that match your domain name. Free email domains will affect your marketing reputation.
Unsubscribe Rate
Your unsubscribe rate is the number of people that unsubscribe from your email list after receiving your emails.
If any of your subscribers unsubscribe from your list after receiving an email, it could be an important message to you. You must go through your email content to check if something unusual exists. It could be that you unknowingly or maybe knowingly struck a wrong emotional chord.
Remember, email marketing is used to build relationships. So if you are getting a high unsubscribe rate, you are getting something wrong.
Spam Complaint Rate
The spam complaint rate is the number of contacts that reported your emails as spam. These complaints can harm you in a very negative way. Once all your emails start going to the spam folder, your open and conversion rates will drastically reduce.
To stop your campaigns from going to spam, keep your content consistent, include a clear unsubscribe link, and avoid using old subscriber lists.
If a contact wants to unsubscribe from your list but can’t find your unsubscribe button, they might go ahead to mark your email as spam.
Email Marketing Metrics – FAQs
How is Email Marketing Measured?
Email marketing is measured by the Key Performance Indicators. The KPIs show you the shortfalls of your marketing campaigns. With that, you’d know what to do to improve your performance.
How Do You Analyze Email Marketing?
To analyze your emails, you have to ask yourself important questions stemming from the email metrics. Questions like:
- How many people opened my email?
- How many people clicked my links?
- What is the most clicked link in my email?
- What time do people open my emails?
Important questions like this clarify how well your campaigns are doing and how you can improve them.
What Is KPI In Email Marketing?
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are yardsticks that businesses use to measure the performance of their email marketing campaigns.
Some of them have already been listed in this article. They are open rates, clickthrough rates, conversion rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, and spam complaint rate.
Other KPIs include List growth rate, email sharing, overall ROI, Mobile Open Rates, etc.
Conclusion
Once you can measure your campaign performance, you can optimize it for better results.
So, pay serious attention to these important email marketing metrics, study them and work towards improving them.