Email marketing is one of the most powerful marketing platforms available today, with one of the greatest returns on investment (ROI) in the business. To be successful in email marketing and achieve your objectives, you must first develop and track the relevant email marketing KPIs.
Take a step back before diving into learning everything there is to know about email marketing. Determine your email marketing goals, and then establish how you will assess your performance.
Each email marketing campaign will be unique, especially if you have distinct goals for each one (for example, generating leads and increasing a subscriber base), but there are some basic metrics that any email marketer should be able to manage.
It must have taken a lot of time, effort, and money to start your campaigns, not to mention the time and effort it took to establish an email list and optimize them.
But none of it will matter in the end unless you track the performance of your campaigns and measure the key email marketing KPIs and metrics.
Here are 10 essential metrics and KPIs for email marketing.
Delivery rate
There’s no denying that having a large email list of prospects/customers is beneficial to your company. Because you can contact them whenever you want for a modest price. There is, however, one exception: sending a large mailing list does not guarantee that all of your emails will be sent.
While you should always attempt to deliver your email to the majority of your list, you can’t expect to reach a 100% delivery rate. One reason is that emails are discarded or modified more frequently than you may believe.
So, if your delivery rate is 75%, the remaining 25% of emails are either undeliverable or do not exist.
Secondly, you must determine whether there is a sudden drop in the deliverability rate. ISP may block marketers for some abrupt reasons, especially if you have a shared IP rather than a dedicated one. If you can’t mail someone with a Gmail address you need to figure out and fix the problem.
Open rate
It’s not enough for your emails to arrive in the inbox of the intended recipient. You must persuade them to read your emails.
It’s important to remember that the success of your open rate can fluctuate depending on a variety of circumstances. The first thing you should think about is your industry. Do all of your email subscribers read all of your messages? No, the answer is self-evident.
The amount of people who opened your email is known as your open rate. Because it demonstrates the number of people who are interested in opening and reading your emails.
The open rate of your email marketing campaigns is perhaps one of the most significant KPIs to watch because it indicates how engaged your subscribers are in your company and what you have to offer.
High open rates are directly linked to subject lines and preview text that is well-optimized and attention-grabbing. If you see a drop in your Open Rate, you may wish to tweak one or both of these settings.
At the very least, you should aim for a 20% open rate. It’s one of the most important email marketing KPIs to pay attention to.
CTR
The goal of email marketing is to drive relevant traffic that converts into more sales.
As a result, when it comes to knowing your subscribers and their motives, the click-through rate is one of the most useful email marketing KPIs to track.
Having a favorable click-through rate is a clear sign that your recipients are not only opening your emails but are also engaging with the content. It demonstrates that your copy is resonating with them and that it is accomplishing its goal.
These are the individuals who are interested in learning more about your company, products, and services. Of course, having solid deliverability and an open rate should come first before aiming for a high click-through rate.
If your emails don’t contain links, you should either focus on the open rate or track the response rate to see how many people are reacting. It’s not rocket science to increase your email click-through rate. You can always get more people to click on your links by doing the following:
- Keep your email to a bare minimum and only send what is absolutely necessary.
- All of your emails should be formatted and mobile-friendly.
- Give your readers a reason to click by motivating them.
- A strong call to action that is repeated throughout the email copy
- Including a video in your email text to make it more engaging
CTR is also frequently used to determine the outcomes of A/B experiments.
Conversions
The conversion rate, often known as CTR, is an important indicator for determining the success of email marketing.
The percentage of email recipients who take the intended action after reading your email, such as clicking on a link, purchasing a product, or filling out a form, is known as the email marketing conversion rate.
Because conversion rate is so important, it takes precedence over all other email marketing KPIs. The number of email recipients that clicked on the call-to-action link in your email copy and completed the needed action is known as your conversion rate.
The objectives of various email marketing campaigns vary. The next and most crucial goal once your email subscribers open it is to convert them via getting them to do what you want them to do.
If you’re hosting a webinar and send a link to it to your email list, every person who clicks on it and joins the webinar counts as a conversion.
Bounce Rate
The percentage of total emails sent that were not delivered to the intended recipient is known as the bounce rate.
A permanent bounce is indicated by a hard bounce, whereas a temporary bounce is indicated by a soft bounce.
A hard bounce is frequently caused by invalid email addresses. This might happen when someone inputs an email address improperly or when a person quits their employment and their email address becomes invalid.
You need to get rid of such email addresses as quickly as possible. In reality, you should sanitize your email list on a regular basis. There are many email list cleansing services available to assist you with this.
Soft bounces, unlike harsh bounces, are produced by a problem with the recipient. It’s possible that the receiver’s inbox is full, that the server is down, and so on.
You’ll miss out on the actual numbers of your email marketing campaign if you don’t monitor the bounce rate.
If you haven’t already, you should add it to your list of “must track” KPIs.
List Growth rate
The list growth rate is a metric that measures how quickly your list is growing.
Take the total number of new subscribers minus the total number of unsubscribes, divide it by the entire number of email addresses on your list, and multiply it by 100.
It’s natural to have some attrition, therefore focus on strategies to increase your list, engage your members, and find new devoted subscribers on a regular basis.
You might want to keep an eye on your list growth rate to see how effective your lead acquisition campaigns are.
Contact lists degrade with time. They expire by roughly 22.5 percent every year, according to Hubspot, so keep a check on your list and clean up your data on a regular basis.
While maintaining your connections is crucial, growing your email lists with accurate data should be your first concern.
Unsubscribe rate
Unsubscribe rate is one indicator that should never be overlooked when it comes to email marketing KPIs.
The unsubscribe rate merely tells you how many people clicked the ‘unsubscribe’ link in your email, but it’s more important than you might think.
Because the number of persons who have indicated that they do not wish to receive your emails has increased as well as the number of persons that desire to stay on your mailing list.
It’s quite easy to track unsubscribes. Any email service provider can tell you how many users unsubscribed after receiving one of your emails. This email metric is typically located in your main dashboard or analytics dashboard.
Unsubscribing in large numbers might be distressing. However, email marketers place a high value on this email marketing measure and consider unsubscribes to be a good sign that you’re fine-tuning your subscriber list.
Furthermore, clearly stating the option to unsubscribe lets subscribers know that they have a say in what kind of content they receive from your brand and when they receive it, which helps to create trust.
Spam report rate
Apart from measuring your unsubscribe rates, you should also monitor spam complaints, as consumers frequently report spam rather than unsubscribe.
Keep an eye on the number of spam complaints, especially if you’ve changed something. For obvious reasons, the spam complaint rate is the scariest of all the email marketing KPIs.
It’s never a good thing when people mark your emails as spam. As a result, you’ll want to keep this statistic as low as feasible.
Email forwarding rate
The forwarding rate, also known as sharing, is an important indicator to track since it indicates how many brand advocates you have. It tells you what proportion of your subscribers refer your emails to their friends and family.
Developing brand supporters through email marketing is an excellent tactic, especially considering that 81 percent of consumers are influenced by their friends’ social media posts when making purchasing decisions.
Check the percentage of email subscribers who clicked on a “share” button to publish an email to a social network like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter, and/or who clicked on a “forward” button to forward the email to someone else.
This is how you get more people to sign up for your newsletter. Encourage your subscribers to forward your email to a friend or colleague if they find it useful, and start keeping track of how many new people you can add to your database this way.
Keep an eye on your sharing rates to see which types of articles are the most popular, and use that information to plan future email campaigns.
Overall ROI
Follow the overall return on investment for your email marketing to boost your revenue. To put it another way, total revenue is divided by spend.
You should be able to manage the entire ROI of your email marketing, just like you should with any other marketing channel. Set up and assign different values to different categories of leads depending on their potential to create money for your firm if you haven’t already.
Every marketer should keep track of overall email ROI. It shows you your campaign’s overall return on investment. Email marketing is an investment, but it provides the best return on investment of any digital marketing method.
Conclusion
The truth is that all analytics can provide insight into the success of your email marketing initiatives. They’re part of a bigger image that communicates your marketing strategy’s tale. You can’t, and shouldn’t, keep track of every possible data point.
Furthermore, one metric may be critical for one campaign but not for another. It all comes down to your objectives and which KPIs might assist you to track your progress toward them. You can see what works and what needs to be improved when you have the correct information, so you can always give what your subscribers and stakeholders want.
