So you’ve got peoples’ interest in your email marketing but how do you track the impact it’s having?
How do you know what you have included is having the desired effect?
Measuring the success of your email campaigns is so important. Think about all the effort you put into creating an email for your clients, only for it to go out into the world and you have no idea how successful it’s been?
That would just start a pointless circle of sending out the same type of emails, that eventually no one would open, and you’d end up being none the wiser.
So here are a selection of the most important email marketing metrics and how to use them.
Click through rate
Click through rate is one of the most important metrics because it shows you the numbers that are opening your email and engaging with the content inside. Therefore, you can easily track the performance of each individual email and see if there is any fluctuation over time. If there is you can see if there is something new you tried in the subject heading that may be effecting this.
If you need help improving your click through rate then you could try split testing. This is a way for you to test different emails, in order to discover which one works best for your audience.
You’ll be able to find out exactly who you are targeting, so you can continue to improve your email marketing for your clients.
Conversion rate
The importance of this metric is that it shows you how well your call to action is working because your CTA should be directly linked to the overall goal set in your email marketing. So what is the expected rate of conversion?
It depends on the industry you’re in and what your CTA is offering. Is it a free ebook download? or are you selling something like a product/service for a special price?
Generally, the experts agree that 1 to 5% conversion is realistic but as stated this could be different depending on your industry and also depends on the ROI, which I’ll come back to in a moment.
Bounce rate
There are two types of bounce to measure, the first are ‘soft’ bounces which are the result of a temporary problem with the recipients inbox or server. These will sometimes be held by the recipients server until the problem is rectified and the email can be delivered, or you can resend
to soft bounces when they’re reported to you.
The other is the one you really want to keep an eye on are ‘hard’ bounces. The reason being is that a hard bounce means the email address is non-existent, closed or invalid and the email will never be delivered.
This is a problem if you never remove these emails form your list because they can cause you to be blacklisted as a spammer in the eyes of the internet service provider (ISPs) who use bounce rates as a factor in deciding an email sender’s reputation.
List growth rate
Of course you want to be growing your list in order to extend your reach but that’s no good if every time 10 new people subscribe 20 others unsubscribe. Therefore it’s important to keep your list at a healthy size and retain those who are already subscribed; you do this is through segmentation.
Segmentation allows you to send specialised emails to your subscribers so you’re not always sending everyone the exact same message, which could end up not being relevant to over half of them. This enables you to plan campaigns, activities and messages that are more effective.
Sharing & forwarding rate
Including the option to share or forward this email to your recipients’ friends and family, who may also find the content interesting, might not seem that beneficial but it’s an ideal way to attract new leads. If that option is there you can actually track how many people it has been forwarded to and add start adding the newbies to your database.
ROI
I mentioned earlier we’d come back to this, the reason being, it deserves its own email marketing metric. As with anything you do in marketing you need to be able to ascertain the overall ROI as whatever you invest needs to come back to you with dividend.
Although, I said before that the usually conversion rate is between 1 and 5% you need to check what the revenue is on this conversion first.
Let’s clarify, if you have two email offers and one is converting at 1% and the other is 3%, you’d assume the latter is the better performer. However, look at the value of the offers and the 1% is worth £250 whereas the 3% is only worth £50.
The end result is ROI determines the success of the campaign.
Takeaway
Email marketing metrics are important and the areas discussed are the ones that will help you track your email marketing success. Ultimately though you need to be thinking about the goals you want to achieve and use these as markers for what to measure in your email marketing.
Don’t forget at instiller we offer analytics as part of our email marketing solution. So if you would like help with your email marketing get in touch.