How effective are your email marketing campaigns? That’s not difficult to figure out if you know what metrics to track and look at. By analyzing this data, you can promptly correct errors, if any, and adjust the email marketing strategy. Let’s walk through the most important metrics and see how we can improve them.
Open rate
This metric shows the number of users who opened your email and is one of the main indicators of the quality of your mailings.
There is no ideal open rate % since it depends on many factors such as industry, time of the day when the email is sent, etc. However, a good open rate is considered to range from 10 to 20%.
If your email open rate is lower or you want to improve the rates, pay attention to the following things:
✓ Subject lines. Write those subject lines that make a good impression and ensure the recipient gets interested enough to open an email;
✓ Optimize the time you send emails;
✓ Make sure your emails look good on all devices;
✓ Make your emails feel like they are coming from a real person. An email signature generator might help you with that. If you include your contact info, profile picture (or a company logo), social media (Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), you will show your readers that you are a real person.
Click-through rate
Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of subscribers interested in the content of your mailings. To know the CTR, divide the number of all clicks by the number of delivered emails and multiply by 100.
A high click-through rate indicates that recipients who saw the call to action (CTA) found it compelling enough to click.
No matter what your CTA might be, it needs to be front-and-center rather than hidden.
When it comes to email mailings, your email signature is a perfect place for a CTA. It can be anything – a link to download your app, your most popular blog post, a YouTube video, etc.
Creating a personal email signature, use an advantage of pre-built templates that follow the best CTA practices.
Conversion rate
Email marketing conversion rate (CR) is the percentage of recipients that completed the action that you requested (e.g., make a purchase of the eBook that you promoted).
To calculate the CR, divide the number of targeted actions performed by the number of delivered emails and multiply by 100.
Let’s say you sent an email promoting your eBook to 200 people (and it was delivered). Then 10 of them purchased the eBook. Your conversion rate would be 5%.
Keep in mind that while 5% is considered to be a low CR for a store selling inexpensive consumer goods, it’s a great result for sellers working with elite goods such as yachts, airplanes, etc.
By regularly checking this metric, you can understand which type of content is more effective with your audience.
Unsubscribes (UR)
Over time, some recipients may get tired of your mailings and unsubscribe from them. Here are two common reasons why people unsubscribe:
✓ They receive your emails too often;
✓ Your emails are irrelevant or simply not interesting.
0.5% or less is a normal UR. However, industry statistics may vary.
If a subscriber has clicked on the “Unsubscribe” button, don’t let them just leave. Suggest a personalized email schedule or other ways of communication with your brand — for example, social media.
Perhaps, a person is not satisfied with the quality of the content. In the unsubscribe form, clarify this fact with a small survey. This might help you understand the reasons for unsubscribes and make improvements.
Spam flags
If your emails receive too many spam complaints, think maybe you send the emails that don’t meet the expectations of your target audience. So, perhaps it’s time to amend your content mailing plan? Also, such a situation may arise if the email was received by a person who never subscribed to receive mailings from you. Spam complaints affect the sender’s reputation, which is why it is so important to monitor the quality of the database. Ideally, you should use double opt-in in the subscription form and send emails only to those people who are interested in receiving them.
How much of your emails should be marked as spam to put you at risk of suspending your email account? Let’s say you send 5,000 emails and five people mark it as spam. Then your spam rate is 0.1% (5/5,000).
Ideally, a spam complaint rate should be less than 0.1% (it’s one complaint per every 1,000 sent messages). To keep your account alive, make sure the percentage of spam complaints doesn’t exceed 0.5%.
Bounces
If you have a good database, your bounce rate won’t be high.
A high bounce rate can indicate that the database you are using is too old. For example, if a clothing store asked customers to fill out questionnaires and provided their emails a year ago, chances are people already forgot that they gave their contact information and even that they bought something from that store. Also, some buyers could have changed their email addresses.
If you are using a database that is not “fresh”, it is better to check it through the email address validation service to eliminate the number of invalid email addresses.
Response rate
Monitor the response rates (RR) to see how engaged your subscribers really are. Responses can come in the form of product or service reviews, answers to surveys, or direct answers to your emails.
To calculate your RR, take the number of email responses received and divide it by the number of successfully delivered emails. Then multiply by 100.
Many say that a good email response rate is around 10-15%, but just like other metrics, RR can vary based on industry, content, and audiences.
To improve your RR, be more personal, segment your audience, and provide value.
Conclusion
Working with statistics is undoubtedly one of the most important parts of email marketing. If you do it properly and regularly, you can easily find weak points in communication with customers and take prompt action. In this article, you will learn about the top seven email marketing metrics that you should always monitor, along with some tips for improving them.
