Email Marketing: 5 Key Email Metrics That Really Matter

When it comes to email marketing there are a lot of stats to keep track of. All of them provide valuable data points, but there are 5 specific metrics that should be getting your constant and continuous attention.

These metrics can help you determine how to:

• Reach a wider audience


• Spend less time and money


• Measure the efficacy of your campaigns


• Improve user engagement


• Stay out of your audience’s spam folder

So let’s take a look at these most essential KPIs—or in this case, KEMMs: Key Email Marketing Metrics—that you should always keep an eye on if looking to streamline your email marketing efforts.

1. Email Open Rate

Email Open Rate is the percentage of people opening your email.

This rate can give you insight into the relevance of your email content for your audience as a whole, as well as key segments and even individuals. A higher open rate can indicate that your email list has high-quality and business-relevant subscribers.

Your open rate also helps gauge the effectiveness of your subject lines. For example, a subject line personalised to each member of your audience will have a higher open rate than an email with a generic subject line.

Here are few tips for increasing your Email Open Rate:

1. Personalize your email on a 1:1 basis. Write to individual people, not segments. Here’s a success story: SHEfinds used personalization to improve their open rates by 20%.


2. Write quality content and magnetic subject lines.


3. Always send emails that have responsive layouts.


4. Send your emails to your subscribers at the right time.

Bonus – Learn why personalised emails increases email open rates by 60%.

2. Click-through Rate (CTR)

Click through open rate is one of the most crucial metrics for most email marketers. It’s the percentage of email recipients who clicked at least one or more link within the email. It gives you a vital insights into how many email recipients are engaging with your emails.

For an email to be effective, it needs to drive action, which is why marketers are so keen to increase CTR and why they often use it as a proxy for evaluating user behavior and email performance.

CTR rates are also frequently used to determine the results of A/B tests, which generally have a goal of boosting email engagement.

There is no universal bar for a “Good CTR, but here’s a post discussing how to set goals around Open rate and CTR, with standards and averages for different industries.

3.Conversion Rate

Conversion Rate is the percentage of people taking a desired action by clicking a link in your email. These actions could include things like filing a product demo form, purchasing a product on your website, or sharing content on social media.

Calculating conversion rates

To calculate conversion rate, follow the formula listed below –

(Number of people who took the desired action/Total number of people who were in the email campaign) X 100

Example – (500 people took the desired action/10,000 people were in the email campaign) X 100 = a 5% conversion rate.

Conversion rate is probably the most important email marketing metric for any brand. Because it measures the ability of that email to impact core business goals.

Conversion rate is the best way to determine whether your email marketing campaign is driving customer engagement in the right direction and having a positive impact on your business.

Don’t lose heart if you don’t see encouraging results right away. Optimizing your email channel for high conversion rates takes time and effort—it’s a process of tweak, measure, adjust, repeat.

However, here are a few tips you can implement to quickly lift your Conversion Rate:

1. A/B test subject lines.


2. Have a prominent CTA in the email.


3. Keep your email layout mobile friendly.


4. Add relevant links to your email images.


5. Personalize your emails based on user profiles.

4. Bounce Rate

Email bounce rate is the percentage of emails not being successfully delivered to the recipient’s inbox.

There are two kinds of bounces – Hard and Soft bounce.

Soft bounces occur as a result of temporary problems with a valid email address. The email reaches a valid recipient’s mail server, but it bounces back fr one of the following reasons:

• The recipient’s inbox is full (The user has exhausted email storage)


• There is an issue with the server, for example, the server was offline


• Email size is too large, etc.

The recipient’s server might hold the email for delivery until the problem is resolved and it’s worth monitoring such accounts to see if the problem resolves on its own. If the problem persists after multiple attempts then removing the email address from the mailing list is your best bet.

Hard bounces on the other hand are emails sent to addresses that are invalid, or to email accounts have been deleted.

You’ll want to remove these addresses from your list ASAP, because hard bounce is a key factor that ISPs use to measure email reputation of the sender. Having a high number of hard bounces can hurt your reputation and land you on the spam list.

Here are a few tips on how you can reduce email bounce rates:

1. Offer double opt-in forms to your subscribers. Be sure that a user is actually interested in your emails by sending a confirmation email.


2. Keep cleaning and optimizing your email list. Monitor for invalid or inactive email addresses and remove them as soon as you discover them.


3. Encourage users to regularly update their account information.


4. Include account management links in every single email to your subscribers.

You can learn more Hard vs. Soft bounces here.

5. ROI Rate for email campaigns

The overall return of investment on an email marketing campaign is the measurement of both the campaign’s success and its cost effectiveness.

Tracking overall ROI helps marketers measure efficiency and optimize their future efforts. It helps us identify what’s working for the business and what’s not.

Here are few compelling reasons to capture ROI for your email campaign:

1. Email marketing is 20 times more effective than traditional marketing strategies.


2. Email marketing is relatively cheaper to implement and deploy when compared with other digital marketing tactics (so ROI is generally high).


3. It increases the chances of selling to existing customers by 6 times. And selling to an existing customer is 10-12 times easier than to a new customer.

Conclusion

Analyzing your data is key to the success of any campaign, but there’s a lot to stay on top of. It’s not always easy to know which metrics to track and which to react to.

By taking time to review your email campaigns and focusing on key metrics, you can get a better understanding of how your email campaigns are performing, and how your email channel is stacking up against other marketing initiatives.

Even though it’s not the new kid on the block, email marketing still plays a pivotal role in customer communication. From generating leads, to engaging prospects, to up-selling customers to maintaining loyalty, email marketing caters to all aspects of the customer lifecycle. Keep an eye on the right metrics, and you’re guaranteed to see measurable business results.