Measuring Success in Email Marketing

Time: 4 Minutes

When it comes to managing the success of your email campaigns, understanding your audiences behaviour is essential.

In this lesson we will explore the benefits associated with understanding email performance, as well as cover common metrics that can provide insights to help you optimise future campaigns.

First, let’s look at why utilising email metrics can be a powerful addition to your marketing toolbox.

Let’s say you own a pet supply shop and have gathered a strong email marketing list made up of interested customers. Using the analytics from your email platform, you can discover the number of people clicking from your email to your website, or how many complete any call to actions you’ve set, such as making an online purchase using a discount code.

This type of informed decision-making can lead to greater conversion rates, and help you refine any future campaigns for success.

So the benefits of reviewing email metrics are clear. But what story, or insights, can these individual metrics tell you? Let’s take a look at five useful email marketing metrics:

An email campaign Open Rate is simply the ratio of people who’ve actively opened the email vs. the total number of people who received it. This is useful for understanding the effectiveness of your email subject line. For example, if a subject line of ‘Things We Love About Our Pets’ receives a higher open rate then an email titled ‘Discounts and Offers on Pet Food’, this tells you your audience favours emails that give them insight into life as a pet owner, rather than promotional content.

Once you know how many people opened the email, take a look at the Click Through Rate, or CTR. This offers a top level view of the success of the individual email campaign, and gives you the percentage of people that clicked on links to your website from every email that was opened.

The Click-to-Open Rate takes into account total number of clicks vs emails that were actually opened. This gives you a more realistic idea of audience engagement because if they opened your email and went on to click a link, you clearly did something right!

Another useful metric is Conversion Rate. Say you have a free pet grooming workshop coming up that you advertised in your email. The conversion rate would show how many people you sent the email to, compared to the number of people who actually ended up registering for the event.

Sometimes, when you send emails they ‘bounce’ back. The Bounce Rate is the percentage of emails that could not be delivered to subscribers and were sent back. There are two kinds of bounces to be aware of:

Soft Bounces: These are rejected due to a full inbox or size limit restriction on your audiences email server.

Hard Bounces: Your emails are blocked or the address you are using is incorrect. A breakdown of hard bounces per email campaign can show you which email addresses to remove, saving you time and effort for your next campaign.
Looking at the metrics and the story they tell will help you understand what’s working and what isn’t. The next step is to adjust any future campaigns accordingly, whether that be to refine the subject lines, review the type of content published, or clean up your subscribers list.

We’ve now covered some valuable email metrics that will help you uncover useful insights from your marketing campaigns. Take the time to try email marketing with mailAUM for free. Get your Account now!

Source: Digital Marketing Unlocked