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About 77% of consumers prefer using emails when receiving marketing messages over other online channels. This preference presents a perfect opportunity for businesses to strengthen relationships with their clients while also building on their digital marketing.
A good cohesion with your customer base allows you to send promotional materials directly to their email. According to a Direct Marketing Associate report, email marketing has increased ROIs by 4,300%!
However, before getting started with email marketing software, you should have efficient metrics to assess, measure, and evaluate your email marketing campaigns. You will know your audience and build upon what works for your enterprise while also eliminating what doesn't.
Here are some of the ways you can measure your email marketing performance:
Different Ways to measure Email Marketing Performance
let's begin....
Open Rates
Open rates show the number of recipients who open an email to read its contents. It represents one of the essential metrics for email marketing that you should be watching. The higher the number of open emails you send to your target audience, the higher the possibility of reaching them through email marketing.
For this reason, most email marketers tend to optimize the email subject lines to increase their open rates. While this technique positively impacts your campaigns due to more opens, you should emphasize optimizing click-through rates.
You can also try making the preview text short, straightforward, and simple with more creativity. Additionally, ensure that you send personalized emails to capture your target audience's interests.
Ensure the subject line includes a client's name while sending an email campaign instead of the company name to stand out from your competitors. You should also make sure it captures their attention and is relevant to the user, and describes what they expect to read in the email content.
Click-Through Rates (CTR)
Click-through rate is a percentage of those who clicked on any links in your email. Usually, there are two kinds; total and unique clicks. Those coming from different IP addresses are unique clicks, while total clicks represent all other clicks, including those from similar devices.
It acts as a day-to-day email marketing measure since it allows marketers to calculate the performance of each email they send. To get CTR, you get the total number of clicks over the total emails you send, multiplied by 100. From there, you can continually track how your click rates change over time.
It's an essential metric for all marketers since it gives you insights into how people engage with you and how interested they are in getting more details about your brand. If you send them relevant emails, you will get a higher CTR.
The click-through rate is also affected by the link's location in the email's body, the number of times you've included the link, the copy leading to the link, and the link's anchor text.
Conversion Rates
If you have run a successful email marketing campaign, you can see it in your conversion rates. With more conversion rates, you get more prospects to convert. It happens when a recipient of your email takes the expected action, such as signing up for a newsletter, downloading an eBook, or any other action that you have as your conversion goal.
If you aim at generating more leads, conversion rates should be an integral part of your campaigns. You can get vital details on how successful the newsletters you send are at generating leads and prospects.
Knowing your conversion rate helps you determine the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign. Note that this involves everything from your subject line, CTA, and landing page. You can calculate the conversion rate by dividing the total recipients who performed your desired actions by the total number of emails sent and multiplying by 100.
Bounce Rate
If you want to measure your emails' effectiveness at setting up expectations, focus on the bounce rate on the landing pages linked to your emails. Bounce rates represent the total number of emails sent that didn't get to your target audience.
Bounce rates can either be soft or hard bounces. The former can result from a temporary issue in a valid email, such as problems with the recipients' server or a full inbox. In such cases, you can try resending the emails, but others may reach the recipient once the problem clears up on their end.
Hard bounces are due to non-existent, closed, or invalid email addresses, meaning your message will never reach your recipients successfully. Note that your enterprise might look like a spammer to internet service providers if you have many hard bounces.
Unsubscribe Rate
The unsubscribe rate indicates how satisfied your customers are with the content you send them through email. In case this rate surpasses 2%, it shows that you need to improve on your content strategy.
It's also worth noting that the unsubscribe rate does not entirely paint an accurate picture of your mailing list's health. Besides, some of the recipients who may have grown tired of your brand may not bother to formally go through the unsubscribe process. In most cases, they won't open your emails.
That said, you need to use the data from conversion rates and CTR to ensure that you have a more thoughtful approach to measure the unsubscribe rate. With time, you can make informed observations on the recipients who have unengaged your content and eventually eliminate them from your equation. You will have a more accurate measure of your unsubscribe rate in your email marketing campaigns.
Return on Investment (ROI)
Your email marketing campaigns' goal is to generate sales and not just to reach your clients. You should keep track of your overall return on investment in each campaign. You calculate it using the total revenue divided by what you spend. You can also get the ROI via other formulae depending on your business type.
If you want to boost your ROI, try focusing your efforts on lead generation. Track the number of converted leads to measure the revenue generated. With these metrics, you can show your sales team the value of email marketing in delivering tangible results.
In case you can't get your ROI, develop an SLA system where you can assign values to lead types depending on their likelihood to generate revenue.
Forward Rate
Many email marketing campaigns focus on trust-building through authoritative content. In this case, you may have to check the number of subscribers that share your content since they find it interesting or valuable. You can get the forward rate by dividing the number of forwarded or shared emails by the total delivered emails, multiplied by 100.
Your forward rate will tell you the type of offers or articles that get shared by most recipients. Use these insights when planning for future marketing campaigns.
List Growth Rate
You use the list growth rate to determine the speed at which your email list grows. Apart from conversion rate and CTR, it's vital to keep tabs on your list growth rate. The goal here is to grow and expand your audience reach. It's also essential in positioning your brand in the market.
Key Takeaway
The success of your email marketing campaign is not wholly dependent on a few metrics. The above techniques give a clear view of how much further you can diversify email marketing campaigns.
By combining various metrics, you can effectively measure your marketing performance and fine-tune your campaigns constantly for better results.
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