Unveiling Crucial Email Marketing Metrics: Tracking Key Performance Indicators

Running optimized email marketing campaigns is no easy task. There are many moving parts in building and managing an email marketing campaign, and getting every aspect right requires the proper techniques. Here we’ll take a look at some of the best practices to keep in mind for your email marketing campaigns, how to overcome common rookie mistakes and the importance of optimizing your emails to increase engagement.

However, no matter how optimized your emails are, if you can’t see the results of your efforts, it’s just a waste of effort, time, and money. Getting inconsistent or lower metrics can ultimately damage your domains and IPs. Measuring email marketing metrics is as important as planning a powerful email marketing strategy. 

Why does Email Marketing Metrics matter? 

The key to executing successful email marketing strategies is figuring out what wins your specific audience and tracking that data over time. Email marketing is a great way to move users through your conversion funnel. It helps in a more accurate prediction about which aspects of your campaigns will have the most impact on driving business growth in the future. Like every other marketing channel, email marketing is also being used to issue spam, which is why the ROI of email marketing has gone down drastically. To prevent having your emails marked as spam by customers, it’s crucial to identify the key metrics to measure your email marketing funnel or ROI.

Measuring what matters in a campaign:

Measuring your results means you will decide how valuable the time, effort, and money spent on email marketing is. Before you go deep into various email marketing tactics, you need to take a step back, determine your goals for email marketing, and then think about how you will measure your results.

Each email marketing campaign has different goals, and thus they can differ from each other. You may want to engage your audiences through one campaign while generating leads, and growing a subscriber base is your ultimate goal for a different drive. However, there are some basic metrics that every email marketer should learn how to track.

Most Important Metrics to Track Email Marketing:

⏩Measuring Click-Through Rate:

Click-Through Rate (CTR) refers to the number of clicks on links within an email as a percentage of emails opened. CTR isn’t an ultimate email marketing metric. However, it’s essential for measuring your email marketing campaign’s success. CTR gives you direct insight into how many people on your list are engaging with your content and interested in learning more about your brand or your offer. 

⏩Open Rate:

According to the Sinch 2020 report, 40% of users agree that they have at least 50 unread emails in their inboxes. The percentage of email recipients who open a given email is nowhere near as significant as the percentage of recipients who click a given email. It’s not just that opens are less critical than clicks, but they’re vastly less critical. 

A lot of people would dismiss the open rate as a meaningless metric. However, it tells you how well your email performed compared to others, and there is some value. It can be helpful to compare it with another email campaign you sent to the same list with the same subject line and content.

Recognizing that most people in your target audience don’t read past the subject line, it makes sense to craft compelling headlines that encourage individuals to open and click through the email.

⏩Conversion Rate:

One of the most common ways is by measuring your conversion rate. It is the same as your website’s conversion rate. Conversion Rate is the percentage of the recipients who opened and clicked on a link in your email and completed the desired action, such as purchasing a product or filling out a lead generation form, even subscribing to your platform, etc.

The email conversion rate shows you how effective your email marketing campaigns are and helps provide a benchmark for future email marketing campaigns. Measuring and curating the right analytics is very important when determining the strength of your current email campaigns. In this post, we will focus on measuring the success or failure of each of your email marketing campaigns. If your goal is to generate leads, then conversion rates are significant as they show you how successful your newsletters are at generating prospects and leads.

⏩Tracking the Bounce Rate & Spam Count:

Email Deliverability is a critical metric, as we all know. It is undoubtedly the most important for anyone sending email marketing. We want to be confident that our campaigns are reaching our contacts’ inboxes. 

It is the percentage of the total emails sent but could not be delivered to the recipient’s inbox. It may sound straightforward to most people. However, a lot of complexities are hidden behind this definition. 

The bounce rate can be higher even when your target list is not cleaned up; an inactive user id is still in your inventory. If you are not appropriately segmenting your email target list, you are sending a massive volume without a qualified warm-up plan, or even if your emails are getting trapped into spam filters, and so on.

To determine the health of your email delivery, look at the number of emails your email marketing software can send in a given hour and see how many of those emails are delivered successfully to the recipient inbox. It will let you know what kind of efficiency factors exist for your email strategy. If many emails end up being undeliverable, you’ll know that there are some fixes needed to improve the process.

Though a bounce rate doesn’t directly link to your email marketing goals, you should still look at it to ensure significant email deliverability and avoid any further issues like affecting IP reputation, too many hard bounces affecting your brand’s reputation as a spammer.

It is a measure of accurate email volume, how many emails you sent to your audience. It’s the absolute number of emails that went out and got trapped by spam filters. Measure this metric immediately after each campaign. If you don’t, you can never be sure that your numbers are accurate.

⏩Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate:

Ensuring email engagement is based on another important metric: the sharing or forwarding rate of an email measured by the percentage of email recipients who clicked on a Share Button to post email content to a social network or who clicked on a “forward to a friend” button.

An email containing at least two social sharing features (such as buttons, links, or other clickable items) could use the highest click-through rate for anything in the analysis. If an email contained a “send to a friend” feature, this was analyzed separately from the social sharing features. Social sharing and “send to a friend” features were analyzed together in each study only if both types of features were present.

⏩List Growth Rate:

Is your email user base growing?

Every email list is going to experience natural decay. Email addresses expire, and people move on — that’s just the way things work. You have an important job: making sure your list doesn’t get lazy and complacent and that it remains strong and vibrant. 

Truly understanding how big your list needs to be to bring you the conversion and growth that you’re after is essential. There’s a lot of conflicting information, but the only way to know for sure is to A/B test it for yourself and then scale up or down accordingly.

For higher-priced offers, you might want to have more sign-ups on your list so you can have a bigger pool of subscribers to send to, which in turn will mean a higher conversion rate for you and less work on your end after sending out an email.

Conclusion:

Email marketing is about relationship building with your subscribers. It’s more than just blasting them with a few well-crafted messages each week. Suppose your emails align with the type of content you offer on your blog and relate directly to what they might be searching for online. In that case, it’ll be easy to see how subscribers are interacting or engaging with your emails and respond accordingly.

Email marketing remains one of the most popular and cost-effective ways to promote your product or service. But the truth is that many emails sent via marketers don’t garner as high a click-through rate as they might expect. Knowing that disengagement can kill your open rates, Kenscio’s professional email marketers offer tips and FREE consultations on how to improve your email performance metrics.