Email marketing is a craft; it takes time to master the basics and to see noteworthy results. No successful email marketing campaign just happens overnight. Building a solid campaign requires constant attention to the latest email marketing trends. A marketer needs to be both tech-savvy and have an active social network presence.
However, simply keeping up with trends and understanding technology isn’t enough to guarantee success. You can build your email campaign on the best websites, using premium email lookup software, and still not see good results. In order to succeed, you need to understand how to measure your progress accurately. This is done via Marketing Metrics.
What are Email Marketing Metrics?
Marketing metrics are the essential information behind every marketing endeavor. These metrics are included in KPI, Key Performance Indicator, which is a measurable value that shows how effective every company is at certain business objectives. Every company in the world has a KPI value, whether they know it or not. This value is used to evaluate whether the company is optimizing its departments and goals to reach a certain goal. In terms of email marketing, metrics help us understand if the campaign is doing well or requires some changes. There are over 80 different metrics that can be tracked: Delivery Rate, Conversion Rate, etc. However, depending on the type of email marketing campaign, certain metrics are more important than others. For example, if you are running an online store, you might find more value in finding out how many people click-open your emails than the ROI rate. It all depends on personal preference and campaign goals.
Below, we’ve included a set of key email marketing metrics that we think can be applied to any campaign, regardless of its end goals.
Key Email Metrics That Determine Success
• Email Delivery Rate
Email deliverability rate is the overall rate at which your emails are reaching their destination. Email deliverability failure occurs when the email address is wrong or when the email ends up in the spam folder. If you think about it, deliverability should be placed at the top of every Metrics list. Not reaching your desired audience means death for any campaign, no matter how brilliant and well-assembled it is.
There are certain things that can be done to boost your delivery rate.
- Email Domain Authentication;
- Non-Spammy subject lines and headers;
- Maintaining your IP allocation;
- Using email finders such as SignalHire to get the most relevant contact info;
- Keeping up-to-date email lists;
- Sending emails that people enjoy.
There are many ways to achieve a higher delivery rate. The key note to take to heart is that you need to deliver content that people enjoy. Your chances of finding and retaining an audience are correlated to how engaging your content is.
• Email Bounce Rate
An important metric to keep an eye out for is the rate at which your emails bounce. Bounce rate measures how many people from your email campaign did not receive your promotional emails. Similar to a failure to deliver an email, a bounce could spell catastrophe for your campaign.
There are two types of email bounce: soft and hard. A soft bounce indicates a temporary inability to deliver an email. There are several reasons for a soft bounce to occur:
- Overflowing Inbox;
- Email provider server unavailable;
- Corrupted email metadata;
- Email file too large for the recipient’s mailbox.
A soft bounce usually resolves on its own unless there is a larger, underlined issue. If you find that a significant number of your emails are soft-bouncing, contact your email provider and ask for guidance. It could be a small issue on your end that prevents you from reaching out to others.
A hard bounce occurs when, for whatever reason, your email message was permanently rejected. This is a more serious issue than a soft bounce since it blocks you completely from reaching a certain person. Hard bounces are rare, but when they occur, they could happen because of these reasons:
- Invalid email address;
- Non-existing email address
- Banned IP address;
- Region block;
- Your email has been marked as malicious or spam-spreading.
If you are experiencing high hard bounce rates, it’s best to put your email campaign on hold and investigate the issue. Then, contact your email provider and ask them to run a diagnostic on your personal and business email. You don’t want to operate with a high hard bounce percentage because the more your emails bounce, the more ‘safeguards’ are put in place against you. Sometimes, although rarely, email providers will even ban emails with high bounce rates out of caution.
• Email Open Rate
While you may be sending your marketing emails to thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of users, if only a hundred of them actually open your message, then you have a problem. Email open rates refer to the percentage of email recipients who actually click on the link and open the message.
Experts agree that a medium of 50% open rate is considered OK for a beginner marketer. Your goal is to use this feedback and to increase the rate to roughly 70-80%. Don’t be discouraged if your percentage seems low in the beginning. Step back and think about what you are doing – am I engaging enough for my audience? Are my subject lines intriguing enough to pick interest?
• Email Forwarding Rate
The email forwarding rate metrics measure how many of the people you’ve emailed share or forward the email to a third party. This is one of the most overlooked metrics since it is hard to measure who is most likely to share your message with someone else.
Someone who forwards an email is called a brand advocate in email campaigns. Even though it seems that the role of a brand advocate is passive – all that is required of them is to recommend your emails to others — this is a very important step on the recipient’s side and a major milestone for the sender.
Building brand advocates happens over time and cannot be influenced by cheap gimmicks.
• Email Sharing Rate
Email Sharing rate is a metric that determines how many of your campaign followers have re-posted your message to their social networks. Similar to Email Forwarding, sharing your emails has the benefit if creating brand endorsers.
Many marketing experts agree that a majority of product advertisement occurs through peer-to-peer.
• Conversion Rate
This metric allows you to track the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link in your email and completed a desired action (survey, video music, article, purchase). This is an invaluable metric if your email marketing campaign features an online store component. Your newsletter would serve to introduce your readers to a concept or product and then direct them to a webpage where they can purchase it or be additionally educated on it.
Low conversion rates signal that either your content isn’t engaging enough or that your campaign isn’t targeting the correct people. Often, the language used inside an email does not match the tone of the service offered. Or, the message is too generalized and does not meet the recipients’ needs and interests.
• Email Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
CTR is a metric that determines how engaging your content is. If your email contains links that redirect your readers to a website or online forum, and your content is engaging enough to sway them, then they will click on those links. The better your content is, the higher your Clickthrough rate will be.
Embedding your links with different fonts or highlighting them in different colors may result in a higher CTR.
• Email Subscription Rate
Every campaign is different, but most marketers opt-in for weekly newsletters. A newsletter establishes a routine for your readers since they will not be surprised when another email from you appears in their Inbox. As a result, they will be less likely to delete it.
When your Subscription rates increase, you will have more followers who will receive your emails. This metric will let you know that your content is engaging enough to warrant a follow. Keep an eye on the percentage of subscriptions – if it begins to fall, you need to re-evaluate your current content and include something that is in step with today’s trends.
• Email Unsubscribe Rate
Similar to Subscription Rates, Unsubscription lets you know how many of your followers have fallen out of favor with your content. We argue that this is an even more valuable metric than the Subscription Rate since it lets you do corrections to your content almost immediately.
Of course, the actual metrics to use will always depend on your campaign goals. The list above covers the essentials every marketer, regardless of campaign specifics, should analyze. The size of your campaign can also vary a lot. When just starting out, look to achieve a medium of 100-500 followers per campaign. It’s better to work with a smaller sample of people rather than with hundreds of thousands since it lets you tailor the marketing and analytics experience. You can always grow your audience later.
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