Not measuring your email marketing campaigns is the same as taking a shot in the dark, it prevents you from seeing important business insights that create action for success.
They help you understand what works and why it doesn’t. Go beyond vanity Metrics & optimize your email marketing for successful campaigns.
Remember that there is no exact average audience & that every audience you market to has different metrics.
Email deliverability is a very important segment to track. Within Email deliverability is a basic set of metrics to track, let’s dive into these so that you can start looking at these in your own business & get started with optimizing your email campaigns.
Bounce Rate
This is the percentage of emails that were not delivered to your recipient as it was returned by the recipient mail server. There are two kinds of bounce rates which are “hard” bounces and “soft” bounces.
A hard bounce rate is when the messages were returned or undelivered because the domain name doesn’t exist or the email address fails to be recognized.
A soft bounce rate is when there are temporary email server issues that may be resolved on a future email send.
Controlling your bounce rate is a key factor in your email reputation & ISP’s will send your email’s to the junk folder or block your emails if your bounce rate is too high. Remove hard bounce addresses from your email list as you do not want to resemble a spammer.
Spam Score
Before you send your email, check your Spam score based on the links in it & email spam trigger words that appear in it, look carefully at your subject line otherwise your email could be filtered out as spam. An acceptable rate for email spam is about 1 complaint per 1000 emails sent.
Delivery Rate
This is the proportion of emails that were delivered to the recipients inbox. This is an extremely important email marketing campaign metric. To engage with a customer or a potential one, that email first needs to get their inbox. If your delivery rate gets worse over time you may be required to pay special attention to your email list as you may have problems with that list. If it is a specific campaign that has been performing badly then check your spam trigger words in that campaign, check the subject line too.
Unsubscribe Rate
It is sometimes difficult to acquire new leads & easier to keep existing ones. Unsubscribe rates allow you to measure how often people opt out of receiving your campaigns.
Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
Is the proportion of recipients that clicked on one or more links inside the email message, it is measured by the number of total clicks divided by number of e-mails delivered expressed as a percentage.
The CTR shows if the email you sent was relevant enough to the recipient for them to make a decision on the call to action links you had in your email.
You should benchmark your email CTR’s to the types of campaigns you have, different types like newsletters, transactional or commercial/promotional mails have different CTR’s, transactional often being the highest of all.
Click to Open Rate (CTOR)
Also known as the “effective rate”, this is the number of Clicks divided by the number of opens and then expressed as a percentage. This rate shows how well your message performed with regards to the design of the message and the offer you sent, for promotional emails, a good CTOR rate is between 20% – 30% and it differs per industry and relies on what type of message it is.
This is a great metric for the evaluation of content & to give you an idea of how relevant it was to the recipient and if it had a good balance of HTML vs images. This is also a great metric to benchmark when compared to campaigns of the same type as it can give you great insight.
Running a/b split tests on your email campaigns can offer more insight into the performance of your campaigns.
Email Forwards & Social Sharing
This is a critical metric to help you understand the reach that your campaign got and the viral potential it received. It also indicates how compelling the recipients found your email & if they were willing to send the message on because they thought it would be compelling to their peers, which in turn creates new marketing leads for your business.
If your email provider has the ability to include a “social share” or “Forward email” link, like Everlytic does, then this is a metric that you should be tracking to optimize the reach of your campaigns and become more viral.
Overall we hope we were able to show you how to take advantage of your email marketing metrics and create success within your business.
We wish you the best of luck in all your future email marketing campaigns.
