How to Accurately Measure The Effectiveness of Your Email Marketing
Email marketing can seem a very daunting task to embark on for many businesses. There are hundreds of terms to learn and thousands of different software packages and providers all competing for your custom.
Before you start your deep dive into email marketing it is important to take a step back and determine what your goals and objectives are for your campaigns and how email marketing can help you achieve these goals.
To help with your quest to conquer the email marketing field, we have put together a detailed list of all the important metrics you need to be tracking in order to analyse the success of your campaigns and improve over time.
Here are 7 Key metrics you need to track and measure in order to improve your email marketing:
- Open Rate: Generally considered the easiest and simplest way to track the success of your campaigns. Open Rate refers to the percentage of users who open a specific email. The open rate gives a general indication of how engaged your subscribers are to your communications without providing much detail. If your open rates appear to be on the low-end side of things, don’t panic. Most email marketing campaigns average a little over 30%.
- Click through Rate: The Click Through Rate (CTR) is the number of people who have clicked on the links in your email and followed them through to your webpage. When creating your emails there are various ways you can increase the CTR, such as including links throughout the email in appropriate places, offering attractive offers and eye catching calls to action. Usually Click-through rates are much lower than Open rates at an average of 2%
- Conversion Rate: An email’s conversion rate refers to the percentage of users that an email managed to “convert”. Converting can mean something different from business to business. For example, if you included a link in your email for a Black Friday deal, the conversion rate would track the number of people who followed the link and made a purchase.
- Bounce Rate: The Bounce rate tracks how many people did not receive your email, this can happen for a few different reasons. Soft Bounces track temporary issues with email addresses and Hard Bounces track permanent issues with certain email addresses. By comparing the Bounce Rate to the Open Rate of one of your email campaigns you are able to get a good idea about the quality of your subscriber list. For example, if you have a high percentage of hard bounces, your subscriber list may be full of fake or old email addresses.
- Number of Unsubscribers: Measuring the number of unsubscribers is extremely simple. All email providers will show you how many people unsubscribed after receiving an email from you. A high rate of unsubscribers from your email list may seem like a bad thing, but many seasoned email marketers see this as an essential metric to track as it shows you are fine-tuning your subscriber list.
- Spam Complaints: The most dreaded statistic when checking the health of your marketing campaigns is often the amount of Spam Complaints. Spam Complaints are pretty self explanatory and measure the amount of people who have reported your email as Spam. Most people report an email as Spam if it is of poor quality or comes across to salesy so if you are receiving lots of spam complaints then you have some serious issues to sort.
- Overall ROI: Email marketing has the highest ROI out of any digital marketing strategy, on average, every £1 spent on email marketing will return £44 of revenue. To calculate the ROI of an email campaign take the money you made from the campaign, minus the the money spent on setting up and executing the campaign, divide by the money invested and multiply by 100.
Wrap-up
Every email marketer appreciates that feeling of satisfaction when an email finally goes out. Once you have hit “send,” the creative part is now over, and you can sit back and wait for the results to roll in. However in order to maximise your ROI on your email marketing the analysis has only just begun. Knowing these metrics and insights is powerful—they fuel future growth for your email marketing program.
With this information you will now be able to track and analyse the success of your email campaigns. Over time you will generate more and more data and be able to further refine and improve your campaigns and watch the numbers go up.
If you’d rather leave it up to the professionals then contact Inboxx for bespoke email marketing solutions that are guaranteed to generate real results and target the people that matter.
