When it comes to managing the success of your email campaigns, understanding your audience’s behaviour is essential.
Let’s explore the benefits associated with understanding email performance as well as cover standard metrics that can provide insights to help you optimize future campaigns.
Why utilizing email metrics can be a powerful addition to your marketing toolbox?
Let’s say you own a pet supply shop and have gathered a good 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 high conversion rates and help you refine any future campaigns for success.
So, the benefits of reviewing email metrics are evident, but what story or insights can these individual metrics tell you?
Useful email marketing metrics
An email campaign open rate is simply the ratio of people who have actively opened the email versus the total number of people who received it. It 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 than an email titled discounts on offers on pet food. It 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 open the email, look at the click-through rates or CTR. It 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 considers the total number of clicks versus emails that were opened. It gives you a more realistic idea of audience engagement because if they opened your email and went on to click a link, you did something right.
Another useful metric is conversion rate. Say you have a free pet grooming workshop coming that you’ve advertised in your email. The conversion rate would show how many people you sent the email to, compare to the number of people who ended up registering for the event.
Sometimes when you send emails, they bounce back; the bounce rate is a percentage of emails that could not be delivered to subscribers and were sent back. There are two kinds of bounces we need to know.
Soft bounces, these are rejected due to a full inbox or size limit restriction on your audience’s 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 subscriber’s list.
We’ve now covered some valuable email metrics or help you uncover useful insights from your marketing campaigns.
Take the time to review the parameters from the last email you sent what story do these metrics tell you.
