With 73% of marketers considering email marketing as an excellent channel, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that email is one of the best performing marketing strategies. From helping you grow influence to building a long-lasting relationship with your subscribers, email marketing can help you do it all. That’s the reason 81% of SMBs use email as their primary customer acquisition channel while 80% leverage it for retention.
However, if you wish to achieve optimum results through email marketing, you need to do it right. Simply put, it is important to make sure your marketing efforts are paying off.
So, how can you make your email campaign successful? By putting your focus on email marketing key performance indicators (KPIs). In short, all you need to do is analyze the right metrics and get an insight into what’s working and what’s not working for your email campaign, thereby taking corrective measures as and when needed.
What are the main email marketing KPIs that you must measure?
If you want to create a better email marketing strategy, you need to analyze such metrics that can help you judge the performance of your campaign. Here’s a list of email metrics that can make you successful in the long run of business.
1. Open rate
Open rate gives an idea about the number of emails opened in comparison to those delivered. To put it in other words, open rates let you know how well your subscriber base is receiving your emails. The average email open rate is 24%. Hence, if you are receiving an open rate more than that, you can be assured that your email marketing campaign is doing well.
The factors that affect the open rate include the email subject line and preheader. You can entice your users to open your email by consistently sending a creative and interesting copy in all your emails. Do it the way Tovala does it through a custom email template.
2. Click-through rate (CTR)
Click-through rate is a valuable metric that gives you a detailed overview of how many customers are engaging with your email content along with the type of content they are interested in seeing. Such insights can help you adjust and optimize your email marketing campaign in accordance with the needs and preferences of your customer base.
70% of marketers are already using click-through rates to analyze the effectiveness of their email marketing strategy. So, if you wish to have an edge over competitors, make it a point to analyze this important metric.
3. Click-to-open-rate (CTOR)
CTOR analyzes the number of clicks in comparison to the number of opens. It works as an effective KPI to understand the level of interaction that emails can initiate and trigger. From giving you an idea about the number of recipients closing the email the moment they open it to let you know how many subscribers interacted with your email content and went to the website, it can help you do it all.
4. Bounce rate
Bounce rate depicts the number and percentage of email addresses that returned an error once it was sent. Bounces can be either hard or soft. Hard bounces are permanent and occur because of an invalid or non-existent address. Emails sent to such addresses never get delivered. Soft bounces, on the other hand, are transient and happen because the recipient’s inbox does not have enough space to accommodate the new email. It can also happen due to temporary server issues. In the case of soft bounces, the message gets delivered once the issue is resolved.
Therefore, monitoring the bounce rate becomes critical if you want to ensure the correct delivery of your emails. You must know that hard bounce rate is a key indicator of sender reputation and is often used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). That’s why it becomes imperative to maintain a healthy email list by cleaning it on a regular basis.
5. Unsubscribe rate
Keeping a track of users unsubscribing from your business is important too. A healthy unsubscribe rate is below 0.5%. So, if your unsubscribes are in line with this percentage, it is good. It will help you clean your email list. However, an unsubscribe rate above that becomes a matter of concern. You must revisit the sending frequency and the content of your email. You can even run several tests to identify the reason for unsubscribes and take corrective measures.
6. Spam complaint rate
People reporting your emails as spam is never a good thing. It can have a negative impact on your email deliverability. Do you know the average spam complaint rate is below 0.1%? Anything above this can damage your sender reputation. Hence, make sure it is as low as possible. You can do so building trust with your customer base. From controlling the email frequency to making use of non-spammy subject lines, there are a lot of ways to counter this problem.
In addition, you can lower your spam complaint rate by making your unsubscribe link clearly visible. In short, if you make it easy for them to leave, you will not have to do much cleaning of your list.
7. Conversion rate
Conversion rate gives you a clear idea about how close you are to reach your business goal. The goal could be anything ranging from making a purchase, reading an article on your blog, filling up a subscription form, signing up for a webinar or an event, and so on.
Simply put, conversion rate depicts the number of subscribers who clicked on the CTA within your email template and took the necessary action, thereby letting you know the effectiveness of your email campaign in relation to your goals.
Remember, conversions are connected with the quality of call-to-actions (CTAs). Hence, make it a point to come up with a robust CTA that compels the user to take necessary action. See how Becel has used a compelling CTA to woo its customers in its HTML email template.
Author bio:
Kevin George is the head of marketing at Email Uplers, that specializes in crafting Email Newsletter Design Templates, PSD to Email conversion, and Mailchimp email experts services. Kevin loves gadgets, bikes & jazz, and he breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on email marketing blog.
