It takes time to get email marketing right. It involves using email marketing best practices in every campaign you create, overcoming common rookie mistakes, and optimizing emails for increased readers engagement.
Of course, each email marketing campaign can be different, especially if you have different goals for different campaigns (e.g. generating leads and/or growing a subscriber base). However, there are some basic metrics every email marketer should learn how to track.
Here are the top 10 metrics every email marketer needs to track.
Open rate
Open rate is the simplest email marketing KPI, and vital to understanding how well your subscribers are receiving your messages. Open rate simply tracks how many subscribers opened the email you sent.
Click-through rate (CTR)
CTR is another common metric that can be telling of how well your campaigns are performing. CTR measures how many people clicked on the links in your email. For example, if you included a link to redeem an offer, the CTR would measure what percentage of subscribers clicked on your links.
Conversion rate
Your click-through rate will tell you how many people clicked your link, while your conversion rate will tell you how many people clicked on the link and then completed a specific action. For example, let’s say you included a link for your subscribers to participate in a Black Friday sale. The conversion rate would tell you what percentage of people that clicked-through actually made a purchase.
Bounce rate
When sending an email campaign, you also want to track the bounce rate. Bounce rate measures how many subscriber email addresses didn’t receive your email at all. Soft bounces track temporary problems with email addresses and hard bounces track permanent problems with email addresses.
Number of unsubscribes
Measuring unsubscribes is pretty cut and dry. Any email provider will tell you how many people unsubscribed upon receiving an email from you. This is usually displayed in your main dashboard or your metrics dashboard.
List growth rate
Now that we’ve talked about the people who, for whatever reason, don’t want to engage with your brand via email, let’s talk about those that do! List growth rate is the metric to track when you want to see the rate at which your list is growing.
Spam complaints
There is little worse than putting your talent and creativity into an email only for it to get marked as spam. Seriously. Talk about a bummer. You may want to ignore those that can’t appreciate a good email when they see one, but, unfortunately, you need to pay attention to spam complaints.
Forwarding rate/email sharing
Forwarding rate/email sharing measures the percentage of recipients who either shared your post via social media or forwarded it to a friend.
Engagement over time
Tracking engagement over time will give you information on when the best times of day and times of day are to send messages. Of course, you can utilize automation in your email service provider to send emails based on customer behavior or trigger, but tracking engagement over time will tell you when you get the highest open rates and click rates for emails that are not automated.
Overall ROI
Overall ROI is a metric every email marketer should track. It tells you the overall return on investment for your campaigns. This means the total revenue divided by the total spend.
Of course, you might think why do you need to know these metrics and go that extra mile for your website if you’re not selling something. Well, let me tell you that on the moment that you decided to have your own blog/website, you kind of signed up for this.
It’s not easy or very nice to know all these marketing strategies, but it helps your voice be heard and that’s what it’s all about. You need to help people to read your blog. An email newsletter is very important and if you know how to make it right, you can expect a lot of audience coming your way.
Just think about it, every time you write a new blog post, your readers will receive it on their email. As simple as that! You can also send an email to your subscribers with a few teaser sentences and a link back to your blog in order to read the complete article.
Don’t forget that a newsletter should always be user-friendly! I learned that the hard way, so take my advice and allow people to subscribe to your newsletter via a social platform of their choice. That way they don’t have to remember another password and it will be much easier for everyone.
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