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Email marketing takes a while to master. Marketers put a lot of effort into their work to yield results. A well-coined email copy needs to be doing its intended job. Opened, read, and converted. Contrary to popular belief, email marketing is still here to stay.
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to engage with your audience and turn subscribers into buyers. Email marketing is one of the digital marketing trends to watch out for. Privacy, customization, and automation have made email marketing a darling trend. Email gives a personalized connection and shows the recipient that you took time and thought about them. This makes the reader gain some glimmer of interest.
Before you delve too deep into learning everything there is to know about email marketing, determine your goals for email marketing. These goals will guide you on how to measure your success accurately. Understanding where your issues stem from can help you fix the problem and grow your audience.
Email Marketing Metrics You Should Track
Tracking your email marketing efforts will inform you whether the strategies you put in place and the campaigns are performing as hoped.
According to our State of Email Analytics report, nearly half of brands (45%) don’t track email interactions down to conversions. Fewer than a fifth (17%) measure their email marketing return on investment (ROI). And only 12% of brands measure subscriber lifetime value (LTV).
1. Open Rate
An email open rate indicates the number of subscribers that open up a particular email you send compared to your mailing list's total number of subscribers.
To use some Mathematics, if your subscriber list has ten subscribers and out of the 10 to whom your emails are sent, 4 open the emails, your open rate is 40%. An email is only counted as opened when one of the following occurs:
The reader enables images in your email to be displayed in the preview pane or a full view of the email.
The recipient clicks a link in the email.
Having an email subscriber list is one thing; whether the email sent are open or not is another thing. Your email open rate gives you a picture of how our email marketing strategy works out. You can get some value out of open rate as a metric if you use it as a comparative metric.
2. Click-through rate
Click-through-rate (CTR) is the percentage of people clicking on and opening links included in the content of the email. The open and click-through rates are essential marketing automation metrics because they indicate that the email body and the subject line have been well crafted, making them exciting and relevant to prospective customers.
Higher open and click-through rates indicate that email marketing campaigns have positive results. On the other hand, unsubscribes suggest that clients are not interested in what you are selling, hence leaving.
Click-through rates are typically much lower than open rates. The average click-through rate for most campaigns is slightly over 2%. The CTR gives you direct insight into how many people on your list are engaging with your content and interested in learning more about your brand
3. Conversion rate
The conversion rate is one of the most vital metrics for sales and marketing teams carrying out automation. Marketing teams nurture leads and hand them over to the sales teams. A high conversion rate is an indicator that the nurturing process is working.
Generic marketing is not directed to anyone, and hence it might not get you conversions. There are so many things to focus on when communicating with your customers. The more relevant the message is to the customer's needs, the more the reader's attention is drawn closer, and they are likely to keep open your mails consistently. This encourages a higher conversion rate. Sending relevant emails improves open and clickthrough rates.
The marketing team is tasked with formulating goals for their marketing automation campaigns, and these should be in line with what the organization is looking to achieve. These goals can include signing up for a newsletter, filling out a form, and purchasing a product/service.
4. Bounce Rate
You have to track and understand your bounce rate if you are sending out email marketing campaigns. Bounce rate is the percentage of your total emails sent that could not be successfully delivered to the recipient's inbox.
As a marketer, you want to keep your bounce rate at 2% or less. If your bounces are already within that number, don’t worry too much—that’s normal. However, something isn't quite right if your bounce rate rises to 5% or higher.
A bounce rate can be caused by an invalid email address or domain name, spam content or red flagged by the email server.
Soft bounces are generally temporary and usually indicate an overloaded email server. Your email service provider will try to resend the email campaign several times (usually five) before giving up. In most cases, soft bounces will turn into a successful delivery after multiple attempts.
Hard bounces: Hard bounces are more severe because they’re permanent failures. Maybe the domain is no longer valid, or the email contains a typo. It’s essential to remove all email addresses with hard bounces as soon as you find them. Campaign Monitor and other ESPs will automatically suppress any email addresses that result in hard bounces.
5. List Growth Rate
This is the rate at which your email list is growing. You can calculate this by taking the number of new subscribers minus the number of unsubscribes, then dividing that by the total number of email addresses on your list, and then multiplying it by 100.
If you haven’t discovered the power of growing your email newsletter subscriber list, you need to look into it. Developing an email newsletter list is a good marketing strategy that can get you heavy conversions once done as annual practice.
6. Unsubscribing Rate
An unsubscribe rate below 1% is a good thing. Once it starts rising above 1%, you need to look into improving your content marketing. The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of email recipients who unsubscribe from your send list after opening a given email.
Your email provider should be able to tell you how many people unsubscribed upon receiving an email from you. This email metric can usually be found in your main dashboard or your metrics dashboard.
Tracking your email unsubscribe list helps you understand your overall email subscribe growth list.
7. Overall Return On Investment
Revenue generated is a question of how effective your email marketing is in converting to actual revenue. Revenue is the most tangible metric of marketing automation. It is the best measurement to justify Return On Investment (ROI).
The amount of revenue generated by each customer indicates the quality of leads generated from marketing automation. High-quality leads translate to significant profits. In addition, revenue generated can identify redundancies in the marketing automation system and rectify them. Email marketing can be an investment but it also has the highest ROI out of any digital marketing strategy.
8. Email sharing Rate
This is the percentage of email recipients who clicked on a “share this” button to post email content to a social network, and/or who clicked on a “forward to a friend” button.
This is something you want to keep track of if your goal is to create content that can be shared widely.