With the technological innovation across business processes, the availability of promotional tools today is limitless. Despite such digital transformation in the advertising industry, email marketing still persists to be a vital part of the digital marketing strategy. Email marketing allows marketers and brands to reach the target audience directly in their mail boxes. Email marketing can be integrated with other marketing channels, such as social media and content marketing.
This cross-channel integration enhances your overall marketing strategy. Email marketing has evolved to adapt to new trends, such as interactive emails, dynamic content, and AI-driven personalization, making it even more effective in reaching and engaging subscribers.
With an ingenious and genuine approach to attracting the audience’s attention, the benefits of email marketing are uncountable. But it’s not as simple as it seems and requires extensive domain knowledge to use the right set of tools and data for an impactful campaign.
Key Email Marketing Metrics
Tracking key metrics is essential to measure effectiveness of an email marketing campaign and make improvements based on data-driven insights. Here are the key metrics to track and analyze for email marketing campaigns:
1. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR is one of the most crucial marketing metrics that assesses your content’s engagement level and calls-to-action (CTA) performance. However, a poor click-through rate does not necessarily mean your communications are pointless.
Implementing some low-cost tactics can go a long way for your campaign’s success. To enhance your content clicks include links across the email but at relevant places for most impact, personalize the content for relatability, and even reducing the number of emails with more pertinent content.
CTR = (Clicks/Delivered emails)*100
2. Conversion Rate
A digital conversion is when a user completes the touted task on a digital platform. This can be a specific action, like a form submission, signing up for a webinar, downloading an e-book, or a metric, such as the number of return visits over a certain time. In particular, conversion rate demonstrates how effectively a brand is able to convert platform visits to sales. It directly correlates with the effectiveness of your email’s primary goal.
Things to increase the conversion rates of marketing emails include intended audience segmentation, compelling CTAs designs, A/B tests, and a straightforward template. You must refine your strategy in order to cater to the target audience’s tastes, and observe higher conversion rates from marketing emails.
Conversion Rate = (Total number of conversions/Total number of visits)*100
While the formula above determines the proportion of conversions per visit or guest, the formula below determines the number of visits during a conversion. The ability to target visits makes this more advantageous frequently.
Visit Conversion Rate = (Number of visits leading to a conversion/Total number of visits)*100
3. Bounce Rate
This is the proportion of users accessing some content on the app or website before leaving. Bounces can occur for numerous reasons such as an inoperative email server, inactive or non-existent receiver’s email account, or being blocked by the recipient. There are two types: soft bounces (temporary issues) and hard bounces (permanent issues). However, instead of fretting about the reason for such bounce categories, you should decrease your overall bounce rate to maintain a healthy email list.
Try techniques like double opt-ins and a sign-up form with CAPTCHA so you only include people to your list consensually. Moreover, you need to maintain the quality of your email list by periodically segmenting and cleaning email addresses.
Bounce Rate = (Number of emails bounced /Number of emails sent)*100
4. List Growth Rate
This is a KPI that tracks the speed of your email list expansion or contraction over time. A growing list means more potential customers. It’s crucial to monitor the sources of your new subscribers to identify what’s working. The reasons for some techniques and distribution channels being more effective than others can be found through this KPI. It measures the effectiveness of your lead capturing initiatives, allowing you to modify your strategy as deemed necessary.
You can increase your list growth rate by keeping an eye on your list deterioration. If your lists start deteriorating faster than they are expanding, you must proactively track the issue to identify the root cause. On the other hand, you can put in additional lead-capture efforts. You can increase subscribers on your lists by gating some of the most downloaded or frequented material.
Growth Rate = (New subscribers – Unsubscribes)/Total contacts
5. Spam Complaint Rate
The percentage of recipients that flag your email as spam out of all the messages you’ve sent is known as the spam complaint rate. High spam complaint rates can harm your sender reputation and deliverability. The accepted industry standard spam complaint rate of 0.1%. Anything above this is seen as being high, although the targeted rate is as low as 0.02%.
A high volume of spam complaints suggests that the email recipients either didn’t know how to unsubscribe or didn’t think they should have received the email since they didn’t understand why they were receiving it.
Do not employ co-registration, third parties, or traded lists to lower your spam complaint rate. Make sure your emails have the same branding and are sent from the same domain as the ones where subscribers joined up for your list. Ensure your campaign’s “from” name matches the branding on the page where contacts signed up. Additionally, avoid sending batch-and-blast email campaigns to sizable lists and deliver pertinent, personalized, automated messages.
Spam Complaint Rate = Number of people marking spam/Number of people receiving emails
6. Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate
This metric measures how often recipients share or forward their emails to others. It indicates that your content is valuable and engaging. With the recipients already added in the mailing list, knowing their forward or share actions is crucial for creating new connections of potential customers.
Making personalized emails is the stepping stone to increasing the shareability of your emails. Customized emails are much more likely to be forwarded than the generic ones. Ensuring your email content attracts organic traffic, something insightful must be used to encourage your audience to forward. Beyond this, adding a proper CTA for forward is undeniably a plus.
Forwarding & Sharing Rate = (Number of forwards and shares/Number of delivered emails)*100
7. Email List Churn Rate
A recipient who removes their name from a mailing list has unsubscribed. Therefore, an email churn rate is the proportion of email addresses that unsubscribed from an email marketing campaign after successfully receiving an email. It can also be understood as the percentage of subscribers who leave your email list over time.
Because the churn rate affects email deliverability, a high unsubscribe rate will adversely affect email service providers (ESP). High churn rates can offset list growth, so analyzing why subscribers are leaving is crucial.
A high churn rate highlights weaknesses in your campaign and demands a close reassessment. It’s possible that your content or template choices aren’t reaching your audience or that your sending volume is too high. You can reduce the unsubscribes by allowing subscribers to choose your email frequency to them, soliciting comments, and mobile-friendly or device agnostic emails.
Churn Rate = (Number of unsubscribes/Number of email deliveries)
8. Revenue per Campaign
The overall return on your email marketing campaign investment is called return on investment (ROI). If your email marketing goal is sales, track how much revenue each email campaign generates.
Email marketing continues to be popular and effective, with an average ROI of $36 for every $1 spent, despite some claims to the contrary. Email drives sales and continues to be the most efficient marketing method because it reaches clients where they spend a lot of time every day – their inbox.
Understanding email marketing campaign’s returns is important to determine whether it is a lucrative approach or is draining your company’s resources.
Email marketing is flexible and can be utilized for unique goals, like lead nurturing, brand exposure, and increasing website traffic. So, you must utilize the proper metrics and acquire the correct data for realizing its potential.
ROI of email marketing campaigns can be increased in ways such as spending money on email marketing automation that enables frequent strategy adjustment to allow contacting many individuals simultaneously at the appropriate moment. When you provide material as effectively and efficiently as possible, concentrating on creating highly focused lists offers higher success rates.
ROI = (Revenue received – Amount spent)/Amount spent
9. Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR)
Comparing the quantum of emails sent during a particular campaign during a specific period to the frequency of the marketing emails being opened is the job of an email open rate. The email open rate rightly indicates your email marketing campaign’s success.
Open rates reflect on the aspect of involvement with your shared advertising materials over time, although the accuracy is not ultimate. You need to be on your toes and adjust your frequency and content if you notice a decline in the open rate. The common cause of poor open rates is that of running simultaneous campaigns. You can safely target a 15% to 25% open rate for campaign success.
With the help of a test-and-trial strategy you can play around various factors, such as the time of day, the subject lines, and the image use. You can go on compiling illustrative data from your experiment to redirect email marketing campaign.
CTOR = (Number of emails read/Number of emails delivered)*100
10. Importance of Tracking KPIs
Extracting valuable returns from the campaign requires a comprehensive approach to choosing, measuring and improving upon the metrics that make the marketing campaign a success. This endeavour requires a thorough understanding of email marketing criticalities and how can these be played around with. By deploying an adequate data of email marketing analytics, you can monitor, report and address the value of the campaign, seek greater funding, and expect executive buy-in. Regularly tracking and analyzing these email marketing metrics can refine your email campaigns, improve engagement, and ultimately achieve your marketing goals more effectively.
FAQs
Q. How do we improve the open rate for emails?
A. Good sender reputation and compelling subject lines that target personalization have been observed to work best for reasonable open rates.
Q. How are device statistics vital for email marketing?
A. Device statistics are essential for email marketing because of the valuable insights about your audience’s interaction with your email campaigns across various devices.
Q. How does assessing churn rate help with evaluating the sustainability of your email marketing list?
A. Comparing churn rates over different periods can help identify trends and assess effectiveness of your retention strategies.
Q. What is the difference between CTR and CTOR?
A. CTR is a broader metric that gives you an idea of the overall performance of your email campaign in generating clicks. In contrast, CTOR is a more focused metric that better indicates how effective your email content and links are at engaging those who opened the email.
Q. How does geotargeting lead to successful email marketing campaigns?
A. Geotargeting can significantly contribute to the success of your email marketing campaigns through a concept called moment targeting, which can be from localized content.
