With 3.9 billion daily email users (Statista, 2020), email marketing has become a widely used tool by marketers. According to HubSpot research 35% of marketers send their customers 3-5 emails per week. And 78% of marketers have reported an increase in email engagement in the last year. Many marketers are adopting this strategy hoping to get positive results but overlooking measurement. For any marketing strategy to be successful it is important to measure the results. Hence, if you have incorporated email marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy you will need to measure its performance.
Maybe you have optimized your email campaigns and done everything right, but you are not seeing the desired result. This could be due to the fact that you are not effectively tracking your email marketing campaigns. Tracking the right metrics and KPIs can help you measure your progress and show you the areas that need improvement.
If you want to start measuring your results successfully then here are some email marketing metrics and KPIs you need to track. Email marketing campaigns can be different depending on your goals and may require tracking different metrics. But here are some basic metrics you can use for all your campaigns.
Open Rate
Open rate is the percentage of email recipients who open your email. It is a good metric to monitor often. Email open rates give you an indication of how successful your subject line is. If your subject line captures the attention of your users, they are more likely to open an email.
This metric also helps you assess whether or not you have a well segmented group of audience. Also, open rate is impacted negatively if you send too many or very few emails. To improve your email open rate, you can consider and review these three areas. In addition, using the first name of each user increases the chances of them opening an email.
According to Campaign Monitor, a good email open rate is between the range of 20-40%.
Click-Through Rate
A click-through rate is the percentage of users who clicked on any link included within an email. This is the first metric every marketer often tracks. It determines the overall success of your email. If your email copy is well written and makes your users curious, they are going to click on the links. It is a good practice to insert relevant links throughout your email copy and create a compelling CTA or call-to-action button. Ensure that each link is placed with the relevant content so that it does not confuse the users.
Marketers often look at click-through rates when they run A/B testing for email campaigns. These tests often experiment with various elements within an email. For example, the CTA design, email layout, link placement and more. It is useful in understanding what drives more people to click on your emails.
Conversion Rate
This metric measures the percentage of people who have clicked on the link included in an email and completed a desired action. For example, if a user fills out a form or completes a purchase. These desired actions that you want users to take depend on your goals. Hence, when you track conversion rate you get to know if you are achieving your goals or not. Conversion rates give you insights into your return on investment. If you are investing in your email campaigns, you need to track if you are gaining a profit. Tracking conversion rate is an important part of any email campaign.
Bounce Rate
This is another metric you should track in every email campaign. Bounce rate tracks how many percentages of emails were not delivered to the users. There are two types of bounce rates which are “hard” bounces and “soft” bounces. Soft bounces occur when there is a temporary issue with valid email addresses. These issues could be related to a user’s full inbox or problem with their server. These emails will eventually be sent after the problem has been resolved. Hard bounces are the result of an invalid or closed email address. These emails will not be delivered.
It’s important to keep track of hard bounces and remove those emails from your list immediately. Internet service providers (ISPs) determine the sender’s reputation through bounce rates. If you have too many hard bounces your company will look like a spammer. Hence, it’s a good practice to track bounce rates.
Unsubscribes
Tracking unsubscribes is easy as many email providers will inform you when someone unsubscribes. If you see many people unsubscribing, it is a good opportunity to reconsider your email campaigns. It can help you make improvements to your campaigns. Maybe you have not segmented your audience, or your content might be irrelevant to your users. Whatever maybe the issue, you can use this metric as an indicator of the success of your email campaigns.
List Growth Rate
This metric shows you the rate at which your email list is growing. It is a useful metric to understand if you are growing your audience and creating useful content for them. Email databases decay on their own by 22.5% every year. This could be due to people changing their old email addresses or if they change companies. Whatever the reasons maybe, you should focus on new email leads that you get. Hence, keeping a track of your growth list is important. If you see that your list growth rate is stagnant, you can implement new lead generation strategies to help you get new contacts.
ROI
Overall ROI determines how much your revenue you gained compared to your total spend. You can calculate this amount by taking the total money made in sales minus the money you invested in the email campaign and multiply by 100. Like any other marketing campaign, it is important to track the ROI of your email marketing campaigns.
This metric helps you prove that your email marketing effort is bringing in revenue. IF it is not, then you can focus on making improvements to your existing campaigns.
Email Sharing and Forwarding Rate
Track how many people are sharing your emails with their contacts. This can offer you insights on which content is valuable to your audience. If the content you share is useful to your audience, they may share it with others. Once you know what resonates with your users, you can use that type of content more often in future campaigns.
You can calculate this metric by taking the number of clicks on a share button, divide it by total number of delivered emails and multiply it by 100. Also, when users share your content with others, it is an opportunity for you to gain new contacts.
Analyze your goals and choose what type of metrics are useful for your company. Every company has different goals, and they track metrics relevant to them. If you have just started measuring your email marketing efforts, then the metrics discussed above can help you get started. These are simple and yet important metrics you can effectively track to understand the progress of your campaigns. These metrics provide you with insights on email performance, email lists and the relevancy of your content. By monitoring these metrics you ensure that your campaigns perform and function well.
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