With social media and search engine optimization (SEO) being the most popular kids in school, email marketing has been relegated to the kid sitting alone at the lunch table. E-mail marketing has long been a staple of many organizations, B2B, e-commerce and otherwise, and although it doesn’t get much attention compared to blogs and articles, it’s still very lucrative and very important part of online marketing.
Like many other types of marketing, email marketing can expand your customer list and help increase the loyalty with those on it, potentially leading to much stronger relationships with customers and an increase in sales; however, it comes with a ton of metrics attached.
When looking at the numbers on an email marketing campaign, it can be overwhelming to sort through email open rates, click-through rates (CTR), unsubscribe rate, spam reports, and many other metrics that email service provider (ESP) solution makes available to their customers.
All that excess information can make it tough to hone in on the email marketing metrics that truly matter in order to efficiently evaluate your campaigns and build more effective email marketing campaigns in the future.
In this blog post, we’re going to discuss the importance of email marketing and tracking your campaigns’ success, the email marketing metrics that matter- and also why.
The Importance of E-mail Marketing:
Social media and SEO gets a lot of hype today, but a good email list with effective email campaigns can do a lot more than just give high-value custom audiences for Facebook.
Email marketing can help you and your company to stay at the forefront of your prospect’s and customer’s minds. And delivering your content right into your prospect’s and customer’s inboxes is more personal, enabling you to nurture your leads more successfully in a customized fashion.
Let’s look at the following statistics and numbers to, let’s look at some statistics and numbers;
- E-mail marketing on an average is 40% more effective at acquiring new customers than both Facebook and Twitter
- Email marketing produces an average 4,300% ROI for companies in the U.S.
- Automated emails have an average of 70.5% higher open rates and 152% higher click-through rates than “business as usual” marketing messages
- Owners of small businesses estimate that spending one extra hour a day doing email marketing is worth $273 an hour
These email marketing stats clearly suggest that email marketing matters a lot and is highly effective, both at nurturing leads and generating sales.
Similar to any other type of marketing efforts, it’s critical to actively monitor your email marketing campaigns as they progress, and for that, you need to understand which email marketing matters the most.
Email Metrics that Matter:
The following email marketing metrics on our list are the most important for accurately measuring the success of your campaigns that can help to increase ROI, sales, and have more effective actions takes on future email marketing campaigns.
Click-through Rate:
The CTR is something that most of the companies and marketers are familiar with across many platforms. It’s a metric that matters most when appraising the success of your email marketing campaigns, or any other campaigns.
A CTR will inform you about how many individuals have clicked on the link to your landing page per email delivered, with the number of emails being irrelevant here. The average CTR hovers close to 2-3%, however, it varies based on the industry you’re in.
With this information, you can ensure you’re maintaining industry standards, and also see how many people find your content to be valuable enough to click to your website or landing page. CTR is an excellent gauge of user engagement.
How to increase your CTR!
In order to increase your CTR, there are many things that you can do. And the best action plan is to select just one goal for each email campaign and focus on just that. Do you want to encourage your subscribers to sign-up for your upcoming webinar or to generate more sales for your offerings?
Pick just one goal and dedicate all your efforts and content on it. This also includes the text in the email, images, subject line, and- the most important one- the CTA that should be both concise and clear. It’s an absolute necessity to provide your subscribers with a reason to take the desired action from your CTA, so make it simple to so.
Conversion Rate:
The conversion rate metric is also a self-explanatory metric that informs you about how many conversions you’ve had for email campaign per email delivered. It’s a very important reason for the very obvious reason: you want to ensure irrespective of what type of conversion you are aiming for, your desired action is being taken by your subscribers. This helps you a lot to gauge how effective your campaigns was in successfully achieving a specific goal.
Conversions can be traditional online sales, however, they don’t necessarily have to be; they can also be a demo or webinar registration, having content downloaded, or any other trackable action you’re basing your email marketing campaign on.
The conversion rates tend to have a much larger range of averages per industry than CTR, with the median being around 7%.
While there are some email delivery software solutions that may track conversion rates with tracking pixels, It’s better or at least advantageous to use Google Analytics instead.
How to increase your conversion rate!
When running and examining email marketing campaigns; increasing conversion rate is usually the bottom line for most marketers.
Following are some useful tips to increase your email marketing conversion rate;
- Add as much personalization as possible in your email marketing campaigns, including specific suggestions
- Make your offers valuable and appealing
- Use web series campaigns (like abandoned shopping carts) to appeal to interested users who need just a little push towards conversion
- Send traffic to a highly-focused landing page where the CTA is clear visible
- Segment your email list based on interests and purchase history to deliver more relevant content
Bounce Rate:
The bounce rate is the total number of your emails sent that didn’t get successfully delivered to your subscriber’s inbox. This occurs when there is a problem with the recipients’ email address; those email s that have not been opened or marked as spam are not included in the bounce rate metric.
There are two types of email bounces- soft bounces and hard bounces.
Soft bounces occur due to temporary reasons that sometimes happen with a valid email address, like a malfunctioning server or having an inbox that’s full and needs to be emptied to receive emails. These aren’t something to be concerned about.
On the other hand, hard bounces are another story, and are caused by permanent problems; they include closed email accounts or fake/invalid email address. As the hard bounces are permanent problems, so just delete those subscribers from your email list as soon as you find out. The ISPs uses bounce rate as part of their evaluation process when looking at an email sender’s reputation, and you don’t want a high hard bounce rate to damage your senders’ reputation.
How to reduce bounce rate!
While soft bounces aren’t something to be too concerned about, as you can always send the email later, hard bounces aren’t good for your senders’ reputation, and can usually cost you money and also decrease your email deliverability on your future email campaigns if you keep them on your email list.
Following are some tips to help reduce your bounce rate:
- Make it easy for subscribers to update their email address on your email preferences page or your website if they change it
- Monitor your email list for subscribers who have consistently been sending hard bounces and remove them from your list immediately
- Have a welcome email series, where users are asked to confirm their subscription, to ensure that only valid email addresses make it onto your list, similar to the double opt-in method
Unsubscribe & Spam Rate:
The unsubscribe rate and spam rate are two different metrics but are similar, so we have put them together in this category. While your unsubscribe rate will inform you about how many of your subscribers have unsubscribed from your list and the spam complaint rate, on the other hand, will inform you about how many of your subscribers have marked your email as spam. And sometimes users will both – Gmail has a feature that enables users to do both with just one click.
While it’s normal to have people unsubscribe from your email list, you want to ensure that certain campaigns aren’t driving your subscribers in droves- and if you are then it’s time to figure what is causing it. Meanwhile, you want to ensure that spam complaint rates stay below 0.2%.
How to reduce your unsubscribe and spam rates!
It makes total sense as to why you’d want to decrease your unsubscribe rates and your spam complaint rates.
To decrease both of these metrics you can do the following;
- Ensure that your emails load efficiently; slow loading emails can kill subscription numbers.
- Segment your email list to keep relevant content going to the right subscribers
- Allow subscribers to choose how often they want to hear from you; giving subscribers control over frequency can keep them on your email list instead of driving them away
- Offer value in all of your e-mails
Sharing Rate:
While the sharing rate informs you about how often the subscribers forward an email to someone else. However, this metric can also include when subscribers click on a social sharing button available within the email to share it on social media websites like LinkedIn or Facebook. It’s calculated by dividing the total number of forwards and/or shares by the total number delivered emails.
This metric is important not just because it informs about high engagement and perceived high value from subscribers on your email list, but also because it’s a referral. Referrals are one of the best ways to achieve relevant customers, new high value, and new subscribers for your email list. This metric can also help you to see how your email marketing campaigns are contributing to your referrals, which is very important.
How to increase your sharing rate!
To increase your sharing and/or forwarding rate, the following are some of the steps you can take:
- Place social sharing buttons within all your emails
- Increase personalization; an article from Marketing Land revealed that the more personalized an email was, the more likely that a subscriber was to forward it to others
- Offer referral incentive programs through your email campaigns
ROI per Campaign:
Your return on investment (ROI) informs you about your bottom line- how much growth in profit you have achieved. Keeping a close eye on your ROI from each email campaign can help you to determine not just whether what you are investing is worth financially, but it also informs you about how much gain in profit you are achieving for each email campaign.
This is what matters the most to the majority of the businesses, so it only makes sense that it would be a very important metric to watch. This is calculated by your total profit per email campaign divided by your total spends per email campaign.
Calculating your ROI per email campaign can help you to identify which email campaign are performing best, giving you plenty of information to learn from and providing you the tools that you need to build even effective email campaigns in the future.
While the ROI per email campaign can help you to identify your most profitable and strongest email campaigns, meanwhile keeping an eye on your overall ROI can help you to see the complete picture of your total ROI from all your email campaigns.
How to increase your ROI!
To increase the ROI of your e-mail campaigns, try the following strategies:
- Schedule emails at peak times to increase conversions as soon as possible within a campaign series
- Be as personable as possible and have segmented email lists based on purchase history and interests
- Keep the cost of your e-mail delivery as low as possible
- Provide value and create urgency to inspire conversions and sales
E-mail List Growth
While everyone wants to have a bigger email list, your email list growth rate is going to be more telling and also more valuable in the long term than the size of the email list alone. The growth of your email list will show you the direction your email list is going in for the future. This metric is calculated by dividing the total number of subscribers by the total number of unsubscribes.
If you have 1,000 subscribers on your email list today, it’s almost certain that all 1,000 stay on your email list by the end of the year; decrease in your email list over time is normal and also expected. This is also known as email churn rate. And your churn rate for your email list should be lower than the growth rate of your email list. Because of this, you should keep a close eye on the growth rate of your email list and also ensure that your churn rate is lower than your growth rate.
How to increase the growth rate of your email list!
You can do the following to increase the growth rate of your email list;
- Offer benefits for subscribing to your email list, like a new-subscriber discount or a free downloadable lead magnet or consultation
- Encourage people to subscribe to your email list on your website in a clear, easy-to-see location
- Continue to offer loyalty benefits and advantages to your subscribers to keep your retention rate higher
Conclusion:
E-mail campaigns should be an essential part of marketing for most businesses, whether they’re purely e-commerce businesses, brick-and-mortar stores, or a combination of both. Like most aspects of marketing, knowing which metrics to focus on can help to increase the success of the email campaigns both immediately and in the long term.
The email metrics explained in this blog post are the most important ones when looking at increasing sales, client actions, and ROI from email marketing.
