Alex Lysak, an expert in marketing, explains why it is crucial to track your email marketing campaign metrics. While you might be tracking how many people open the email or how many people click on the links, these metrics aren't enough to gauge the overall success of an email marketing campaign.
Direct marketing is an effective method to inform your target market about your offering or service. Scanteam wants to help you get the most out of the campaigns you launch and better understand email marketing metrics.
What are Email Metrics?
If you're unsure what email marketing KPIs are, let's clarify. You get internal and external KPIs. The first ones refer to information about the email's opening, clicking on links, unsubscriptions, and email bounces. In other words, the interaction with the email. External KPIs refer to your customers' actions outside of the email, such as browsing on an e-commerce shop, blog, or website.
Email analytics is similar to Google Analytics. It gives information about the traffic volume that the email attracted to your website, the average amount of purchases, and respondents to a call to action.
Email marketing data is only valuable if you know how to use it. Specific data will be more critical to track for your goals than others. Let's see which email marketing metrics are the most important ones.
Open Rate
The open rate will give you insight into how well your recipients are receiving your message. It rates the success of your email subject line by tracking how many recipients opened the email.
The Click-Through Rate
You may know how many customers opened your message, but do you know how many read it and clicked on the links? Tracking the CTR will give you more insight into how your content engages your target audience and drives further action.
The CTR is often used in A/B tests designed to find new ways of getting more clicks on your email. It is one of the first things that you should track when you launch an email marketing campaign.
The Conversion Rate
You want to track how many customers complete the desired action (Call to Action) after opening your email and clicking on a link. To gauge the communication's success, you want to know how many of the recipients did what the email asked them to do: read, purchase, click a button, etc. The Conversion Rate goes hand-in-hand with the Click-Through Rate.
The Delivery Rate, Bounce Rate, and Unsubscribes
The delivery rate is the number of successfully delivered emails to your recipient's inbox. It's directly linked to the bounce rate. If your delivery rate is below 95%, there might be something wrong with your mailing list.
The bounce rate is the number of sent emails that remain undelivered to the recipient's inbox. Basically, if you deduce your Delivery rate from 100%, you'll get the bounce rate. Emails usually bounce due to incorrect email addresses and people closing email accounts. Marketers call this type of delivery failure a "hard bounce." A "soft bounce" is a temporary problem with the recipient's address, such as an issue with the server or a full inbox.
If you have too many hard bounces, you can be marked as a spammer by internet service providers. So while this information might not be linked to your marketing strategy directly, you need to improve your mailing lists.
Email analytics can help you track the number of addresses that unsubscribe from your campaign. If more than 20% of your customers unsubscribe, there might be a problem with the emails you send. Check the content and length of the email and make sure they are relevant. Also, keep in mind that sending too many emails can annoy subscribers and result in unsubscribes.
List Growth Rate
As the name suggests, you want to measure the rate at which your mailing list grows. The growth should be steady and natural if you keep your emails concise and consistent. Many factors can contribute to the growth of your mailing list. You can always nudge the organic growth of your mailing list with paid ads.
Return on Investment
Is the email campaign achieving the goals that you have set, and is it generating revenue? If your email campaign's investment is not yielding a return, you need to rethink it.
Spam Complaints
The spam complaints are closely related to the number of unsubscribes. If your emails aren't good enough or people find them offensive somehow, they will unsubscribe and mark the message as spam. Tracking this metric will give you insight into how well your content works for your recipients.
Email Sharing
An indicator of your campaign's success is the number of recipients who forward your email to friends or family. This makes your audience bigger and shows that your list is engaging with the content.
Devices
It's insightful to know whether your customers open emails on a desktop or a mobile device. It can help you to refine your content and delivery mechanisms. Plus, using this knowledge will help you better optimize the email layout for the devices that prevail in your crowd.
How Can You Improve Your Campaign?
If you want to get the most out of your email marketing, start with an email analytics template. It can help you make sense of the data and make decisions about the content of your emails and the reach of the campaigns.
An email marketing campaign must meet defined goals. It should, at the very least, broaden your audience. Ideally, each email you send should result in revenue.
Email marketing metrics give you useful data about the content of your communication and user behavior.
An email analytics tool like HubSpot or Sender will help you compile the data you need to track your campaign's success. You can also use advanced email metrics once you have mastered the basics.
Conclusion
The more you know about how your target audience, the more you can improve your content, frequency, and offers. It's vital to have insight into the number of recipients who open and engage somehow with the email. So, keep your lists updated, your content crisp, and your analytics tools ready. Your bottom line will thank you later!