6 Must-Follow Email Marketing Metrics
When it comes to managing the overall success of your email marketing campaign, understanding your targeted audience’s behaviour is essential. Today we will talk about the benefits associated with understanding email performance and cover standard metrics that can provide insights to help you optimise future campaigns.
Firstly, let’s look at why utilising email marketing metrics can be a powerful addition to your marketing toolbox. For example, let’s imagine that you own a pet salon and have created a strong email marketing list made up of interested customers.
Using the analytics from your email platform, you can discover the number of people clicking from your email to your website, or how many complete any call to actions you’ve set such as making an online purchase using a discount code. This type of informed decision-making can lead to higher conversion rates and help you refine any future campaign for success. So the benefits of reviewing email metrics are clear now. Although, what story or insights can these individual metrics tell you? Let’s take a look at six useful email marketing metrics.
1. Open rate
The open rate is simply the percentage of email receivers who opened a specific email. It is useful for understanding the effectiveness of your email subject line. For instance, if a subject line of “Things we love about our dogs” receives a higher open rate than an email “Discounts and offers for pet salon,” this tells you that your audience likes more insights for life as a pet owner rather than promotional content.
Comparing the Sender email marketing service open rate results of 2018 and 2020, we can see that the average open rate increased by 3.2%. Although you have to take into consideration that emails from specific industries get higher results—for example, banking, hospitality, government, etc.
Image source: Sender.net
2. Click-through rate (CTR)
Once you know how many people opened your email, take a look at the CTR. This offers a top view of the success of the individual email campaign and gives you the percentage of people that clicked on links to your website from every email that was opened. The Click-through open rate metric takes into account the total number of clicks versus emails that were actually opened. This gives you a more realistic idea of audience engagement because if they opened your email and went on to click a link, you clearly did something right.
One type of links get higher results; it’s File/Link to invoice or payment. People are used to clicking on such kinds of links.
3. Conversion rate
Another metric worth following is the conversion rate. For example, you have a free dog cleaning workshop coming up that advertised in your email. The conversion rate would show how many people you sent the email to compared to the number of people who actually ended up registering for the event.
4. Bounce rate
The Bounce rate is the percentage of emails that could not be delivered to subscribers and were sent back. The Bounce Rate is the percentage of email that could not be delivered to subscribers and was sent back. There are two kinds of bounces to be aware of:
- Soft bounces: these are rejected due to a full inbox or size limit restriction on your audience’s email server. This is a temporary mistake, and it can be solved in the future.
- Hard bounces: your emails are blocked, or the address you are using is incorrect.
A breakdown of hard bounces per email campaign can show you which email addresses to remove, saving your time and effort for your next campaign.
Looking at the metrics and the story they tell will help you to understand what’s working and what isn’t. The next step is to adjust any future campaigns accordingly, whether that be to refine the subject lines review the type of content published, or clean up your subscriber’s list. Now take time to review the metrics from the last email you sent - what story do these metrics tell you?
5. Unsubscribe rate
The percentage of people who unsubscribe after opening a delivered email metric is also significant to follow. Mainly if you try something new with your email campaigns. This way, you can react to changes and understand that the decisions you made were not right for your targeted audience.
Although don’t panic if, from time to time, you will see that people are leaving your mailing list, people change, and their needs change. Change your techniques and tactics only if these numbers are higher than regular. Especially, this year we can see from Sender results that people are clean their emails more often and often unsubscribe if the content is not relevant to them anymore.
6. Overall ROI
If you are a business owner or blogger, then you know how important it is to count is it worth using a specific marketing channel or not and you can be for sure that email marketing will pay off for you. Overall ROI means the return on investment for your email campaigns. Shortly, total revenue divided by spend.
According to Sender 2020 marketing email marketing results, the average ROI is x$41 returns. That means that when you spend $1 in return, you will earn $41. That is a huge improvement from last year’s overall ROI - an increase of three times. That proves how email marketing is essential in today’s digital marketing world.
To wrap up, I just want to say that don’t forget about your goals, what you want to get from your email marketing campaigns, and then all of those metrics will improve all of your game. Only by following the most important email marketing metrics, you can understand your target audience and offer them the best content.