More than ever, email marketing is one of the best ways to reach out to existing customers, remind them of who you are, what you have to offer and how you add value to their lives, even when they are not shopping. Now that first-party data is more important than ever, email marketing offers a solid, integrated strategy within your broader marketing efforts.
As with every other area of your business marketing, including tracking the return on investment (ROI) from your social media campaigns, measuring the success of email marketing is critical to improving as you go.
Use the following metrics to gauge the success and health of your email marketing efforts. Benchmark your data and work to improve it month after month until you have it down to an exact science.
Email Marketing Metrics: The Essentials
Having a solid foundation for your email marketing analytics strategy will ensure that you consistently get a solid return on investment (ROI) while benefiting from continuous growth. To do this, it’s important to track and measure these essential email marketing metrics.
Clickthrough Rate
You might be wondering why open rate isn’t the first metric summarized in this guide—isn’t that synonymous with email marketing? Maybe, but look at it this way: Would you measure the effectiveness of a promoted post on Facebook by how many likes it got, or how many people clicked through to your website?
If you’re A/B testing subject lines, or comparing the performance of your newsletter on a weekly basis, but if you really want to gauge how recipients are interacting and how engaging, open rates can be a valuable email marketing metric to track. Every email you send, and whether or not they’re converting, then clickthrough is a metric for you. Click-through rates can give you a detailed understanding of how many subscribers are engaging with your content, and what type of content they’re interested in consuming, whether it’s a blog post or a product offer. These are the bits of knowledge that can truly help you change and further develop your email marketing endeavors.
Comprehensive reports on your open and click-through rates can be obtained through your email service provider.
Conversion Rate
A logical progression from getting clicks is tracking your conversion rate. A well-crafted marketing email should always have a compelling call to action (CTA) and now is the time to measure whether your subscribers have taken action! Whether your CTA is to download a handout or buy into a web recording, your change rate will assist you with following how well you’re accomplishing your objectives.
You can set up a view within Google Analytics to specifically monitor traffic to your website that is generated through email referrals. Better yet, you can create goals to track conversions and further categorize your email marketing success!
Sunnyday Consulting pro tip: Marketers using Google Analytics need to start learning about GA4 – and use it today.
Subscriber List Activity
It’s vital to follow both the development and decline of your subscriber records. List growth is important because it increases your reach and maximizes the chances of subscribers engaging with your emails and ultimately converting. However, the end of the subscriber list is inevitable. According to HubSpot, email marketing databases naturally decline by about 22.5% each year.
If you see significant growth in your subscriber list over time, you should always try to identify that success: Are your recipients receptive to a particular type of content or topic? Is the growth related to the marketing activity you are carrying out through additional digital channels? Similarly, if you’re experiencing more subscriber drop-off than you’d like, you can analyze these factors as well to ensure that:
- Your subscriber lists are properly segmented to ensure you are targeting customers with the most relevant email content possible.
- Your subscriber data is regularly cleaned to ensure no outdated or incorrect email.
- Re-engagement campaigns are run for unqualified leads who are more likely to opt out.
- Information about the performance of your subscriber lists can be obtained from within your email service provider.
Bounce Rate
A classic email marketing metric, bounce rate is the percentage of emails that were undeliverable to subscribers and were sent back to your email service provider. But did you know that there are two types of bounces that you should monitor?
Hard Bounce: Messages that are permanently rejected because of an invalid email address or because the recipient’s server has blocked your server.
Soft Bounce: Messages that are temporarily rejected because the recipient’s inbox is full, the server is down, or exceeds the size limit set by the email recipient or email service provider.
Bounced emails, bring us back to the essential concept of cleaning subscriber data. You should remove any hard bounce email addresses from your subscriber lists immediately, or risk damaging your sender reputation, as your email may trigger spam filters. It’s also helpful to check if your hard bounces are coming from the same domain; If they are, it may mean that a certain ISP or company’s server is blocking you, which you can solve with politeness and ease. Unless you’re spamming, of course.
Bounce errors may be reported per email campaign within your email service provider. You can also find out which email addresses bounced and edit or remove them accordingly.
Email Forwarding
The rate at which your subscribers share and forward your emails to their contacts is a valuable insight for several reasons. This tells you how much subscribers were entertained or engaged by your email content and how much they might enjoy that content.
Tracking forwards also gives you an additional opportunity to grow your subscriber list with contacts who are likely to receive and read your emails. You can create new leads by empowering your perusers to share your email or forward to a companion. Email service providers like MailChimp allow you to add a “Forward to Friend” button or link to your email template.
Email forwards do not take into account users who copy and paste links from your email into their own emails, or instant chat messages for example. Nor do they envelop beneficiaries who utilize the local forward button in their email client. So while this measurement is a valuable one, we simply need to acknowledge that there is a degree of information that we will always be unable to follow.
Engagement
The level of understanding you can gain from analyzing how subscribers interact with your emails is much more detailed and meaningful than whether or not they opened it in the first place. Assuming that a beneficiary draws in with your email, you can be sure about the information that you are well en route to accomplishing your email marketing objectives. Email commitment as a measurement can be separated and broke down in two ways:
Engagement based on time and day
Everyone wants to know the best time of day and day of the week to send their marketing email. It’s a good idea to give your mission the most ideal battling possibility. In reality, there is no magic time or golden hour, it varies based on a number of factors from industry to geography to customer personality. So it’s useful to measure your success! Experimenting with your scheduling at different times of the day and on different days of the week can give you comparative data that tells you when subscribers are most likely to engage with your emails.
Time spent engaging with email content
When it comes to content marketing, we can measure how much time a user spends engaging with content on a particular web page using Google Analytics. With email marketing, the length of engagement with email content is just as important, and the longer a subscriber spends reading your email, the better. This sort of knowledge will permit you to fit the substance of your emails to ensure the most extreme commitment.
If you send your emails using Hubspot, for example, they’ll report the amount of time a subscriber spent viewing your email, and break it down into categories (views, skim read or read) based on how much time they spent viewing it.
Device Type and Email Client
An important principle of email campaign design is to evaluate how the email will appear on both mobile devices and different email clients from a creative and content-based perspective.
Increasingly more email beneficiaries are utilizing cell phones to see email content for better adaptability and comfort. If you’re not already doing so, you should optimize your emails for mobile to reach a larger audience.
With regards to email clients, various clients view different email content in various ways. In addition to the fact that you can use your email specialist organization to test how your email will seem to beneficiaries utilizing various clients, numerous ESPs enlighten you concerning your subscribers’ favored email clients.
Email forward or share rate
Another helpful email marketing metric to follow is email forward or share rate. This insight will show you the percentage of your audience or recipients who were compelled to share your email content with their colleagues.
This marketing metric will give you a solid idea of how valuable and entertaining your email content is to specific segments of your audience. If you see a sharp increase in your email forward or share rate, you’ll have the insight you need to create future communications in the same format or style.
Typically, an email forward rate is calculated by dividing the amount of forwards or shares by your total number of emails sent or delivered in a specific time frame, but most email marketing tools will calculate your So will calculate it.
Improve Your Email Marketing Performance
Since it has become so undeniably obvious which email marketing measurements to follow for progressing development and achievement, we should see substantial ways of expanding your exhibition.
- Clean your subscriber data regularly to ensure it is up-to-date and accurate. Avoid these annoying email bounces where possible. Stay up-to-date on data privacy issues for marketers.
- Segment your subscriber lists so you can be sure you’re targeting your audience in a relevant and effective way to maximize engagement.
- Create comprehensive, compelling content. Keep in mind your target audience and what they want or need. Try to include them in a way that gives them value, and don’t forget to use personalization! Remember to use your engagement metrics to track your performance and optimize your content for the best possible ROI.
- No spamming. Be aware of your utilization of designing, language, connections and symbolism. Ease off of the covers and interjection marks!!!
- From split-testing subject lines, CTA buttons, and design elements to measuring shares and click-throughs, analytics give you a platform to achieve your goals and optimize your performance. Keep testing, keep improving
- Use relevant email marketing metrics to test the performance of your subject lines and preheader text. Tip: Using marketing action words, writing in active tense, and using emojis (slightly) will help make your subject lines more clickable.
Do you want to know more about A Practical Guide to Email Marketing Metrics? Contact us at support@sunnydayconsulting.com or check our website at www.sunnydayconsulting.com!
