Email marketing is the secret potion of many things: following the best practices in every campaign, learning from common rookie mistakes, and optimizing emails for a better engagement. Well, that’s not all. In the end, you should also know how to quantify your efforts through email metrics.
It’s essential to be clear about your email marketing goals and what would define your campaign’s success. Though every email marketing campaign is different, there are some fundamental metrics that every email marketer should learn to track.
Open Rate
The open rate is the simplest and most apparent email marketing metric to quantify. It reflects how well your subscribers are receiving your emails. The open rate determines the number of subscribers who opened the email which you have sent.
The open rates depict the success of your subject line copies. For instance, a report revealed that “Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.” Apart from that, you can also leverage tactics like including emoticons in subject lines. Keeping subject lines direct and short also helps in increasing the open rates.
A 2020 email marketing study revealed that “Most email campaigns average an open rate of a little over 24%.” If your open rate surpasses this number, then you are on the right track. If not, then such metrics help you identify the weak link of your email marketing campaign.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR is another standard metric that determines how well your email campaigns are doing. CTR tracks the number of people who have clicked on the links mentioned in your emails. For instance, if your email had a link for redeeming an offer, the CTR would evaluate the subscribers’ percentage that clicked on your links.
There are a few ways by which you can increase your emails’ CTR. You can mention the links throughout at appropriate spots and support them with an eye-catching call-to-action button.
Click-through rates are usually lower than open rates. The average click-through rate for most campaigns stands at slightly over 4%.
Conversion Rate
The most important metric of them all is conversion rate, validating your entire email marketing campaign’s success. While the click-through rate tracks the number of people who clicked on your link, the conversion rate reveals how many people actually clicked on the link and then completed a specific action (which you asked for through the CTA).
The conversion rates also shed light on your return on investment. You can calculate it by stacking the amount you have spent against how many subscribers your emails have converted. That way, you can determine if things have gone in your favor or not.
Bounce Rate
As the name suggests, the bounce rate tracks how many subscribers did not receive your email. While soft bounces determine temporary issues with email addresses, hard bounces, on the other hand, measure the permanent problems with email addresses.
Stacking your bounce rates against open rates will give you a clear picture of the quality of your subscriber list. If your hard bounces are higher in number, your list might consist of addresses with mistakes in them, old and redundant email addresses, or even fake email addresses.
One way to preemptively decrease your bounce rates is by requiring a double opt-in. This technique requires subscribers to verify their email address and confirm their acceptance of receiving emails from your brand. A mandatory double opt-in feature is great at ensuring higher quality email lists and keeping bounce rates as low as possible.
Number Of Unsubscribes
Measuring unsubscribes is a simple task. In most cases, any email provider would notify you how many people have pressed that unsubscribe button upon receiving an email from you.
A high number of unsubscribes can hurt your campaign. However, it is a trend amongst email marketers to prioritize this metric. They often consider unsubscribes as good since they indicate the process of fine-tuning your subscriber list.
Moreover, giving your subscribers the liberty to unsubscribe and choose when and what kind of content they wish to receive from your brand helps build a sense of trust and brand value amongst them.
Spam Complaints
As an email marketer, seeing your emails getting marked as spam can be really heartbreaking. You may ignore spam complaints sometimes, but they require your due attention.
The primary objective of all email service providers is to ensure quality and keep an eye on spam complaints. Hence, if your spam complaints rate gets too high, your email service provider might take action and block your account.
The email service provider usually tracks the number of spam complaints about you. But, it’s better that you keep an eye on it yourself to ensure that your emails have done nothing wrong, and they meet your desired standards.
Wrapping Up
These are some of the most significant email marketing metrics which every marketer should track. While considering any metric’s relevance to your campaign, you should know that an email marketing metric should always:
- Provide you with valuable data-driven insights for direct email campaigns.
- Give you a clear idea about user behavior.
- Help your team determine the weak link of your campaign and provide a way to improvise it.
Once you have identified the metrics that matter to you, it’s essential to act as per their findings and fine-tune your campaigns accordingly.
Author Bio
Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest-growing custom email design and coding companies, and specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion, and responsive HTML email templates. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz, and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.
