To this day, emails continue to dominate the way in which business is done. We use them to communicate with clients and other businesses. We use them to for internal organization. And most importantly, we use them to promote our companies. So, what is the best way to ensure that our emails are having the right effect on leads? That’s logical – you need to monitor all the essential email marketing metrics. And what are those? This is something we aim to find out today.
Which email marketing metrics are most important?
As experienced digital marketers, we’ve come across important metrics that we use to measure the effectiveness of email campaigns and communication. So, here is the Movers Development take on the essential elements to analyze when it comes to email marketing efforts:
Deliverability Rate
In terms of email marketing metrics, this one serves as a great indicator of the overall quality of your mailing list. Why? Because it shows the percentage ratio of the total number of emails sent vs. those actually sent.
Bounce Rate
Quite simple and well-known among email marketing metrics. You count an email as delivered unless the recipient rejects the email and returns it to you. In this case, the email is counted as a bounce back to the sender (your company). However, not all bounces are the same. In fact, they are usually divided up into three categories:
- Soft Bounce. Associated to temporary issues on the receiver’s end – e.g. full mailbox or issues with the server.
- Hard Bounce. Usually defined as a more permanent error, such as an invalid email address.
- Block Bounce. The name speaks for itself – an indication of you being blacklisted by the recipient or your email being marked as spam emails.
You need to take Block Bounce into consideration when analyzing email marketing metrics.
Device Usage data
With such a large and diverse number of devices that people use today, it’s important to know who your customer base is. This means that you need to find out whether your emails were opened on smartphones, tablets or desktops. Modern statistics indicate that 50-60% of emails are opened via mobile phones. By having a percentage for each device, you gain a useful insight into the mobile responsiveness of your email campaign efforts. As a result, you can focus your future efforts on specific device users in terms of appeal, design, content etc.
Open Rate
Although a widely popular metric, open rates are often presented as misleading among email marketing metrics. But we will include them in our list since you can use them to evaluate your overall success. The main feedback you can get from open rate metrics is how influential and appealing your subject lines are. That said, it takes time to receive relevant and useful information from this approach.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Given that most email campaigns have the goal to lead readers to a certain page, the click-through rate plays an important role. It serves to measure just how many people will follow the link you provide inside the email. Usually, your marketing automation platform will automatically attach the tracking codes to the email you send. And the easiest way to calculate your CTR is to divide the number of unique clicks by the number of delivered emails. You then multiply that number with 100 and voila.
Click-to-Open Rate
Unlike CTR, the click-to-open ratio aims to measure the number of recipients that clicked on any link within the body of your email. As far as email marketing metrics go, this one is a good indicator of reader intent. How can you calculate this ratio? Unique clicks/unique opens x 100. Many email experts will agree it’s more indicative of engagement than just CTR.
Subscribers – essential among email marketing metrics today
This particular metric plays a crucial role in the digital society we live in today. After all, subscribers are willing readers that volunteer their personal information with the promise to receive relevant data from you. Whether this is a promotional deal, loyalty program benefits, newsletter or something else, they will become willing participants and readers so long as you deliver.
What is the main take here? Not so much the overall impact of your emails as the overall strength of your brand as a moving business. Of course, like open rate, it takes time to measure and analyze subscriber growth. Thus, this metric is most meaningful when measuring over longer courses of time.
Unsubscribe Rate
The next step in analyzing subscribers, yet a separate element among email marketing metrics. In fact, the data you receive from subscriptions can be a good signaling method for red flags. With each delivery of email campaigns, subscriptions can show you just how effective (or ineffective in this case) your campaign was.
Revenue/Leads per Email
When you are looking to attract the customers to your cause, the only worry you have is the ROI. Revenue generated from successful email campaigns, then, is one of the most crucial email marketing metrics you want to be sure to get right. Over time, this metric will help you understand not only how different kinds of campaigns perform, but also how much you can expect, on average, from each recipient. How can you get to this particular result? Divide the total revenue earned from the campaign by the number of total emails delivered/opened.
Open/Click Reach
How does one determine the unique engagement of emails? By using what is known as Open Reach and Click Reach:
- Open Reach – the total number of unique opens divided by the total number of your subscribers.
- Click Reach – the total number of unique clicks divided by the total number of your subscribers.
These particular email marketing metrics serve to demonstrate how your subscribers behave and act. Once you know that and gain a better understanding of subscribers, it will become easier to draw a connection between them and the conversions/revenue you achieve. However, bear in mind that these metrics need to be monitored regularly for no less than 18 months.
