Marketing has become more measurable and numbers-driven, therefore, to be a successful marketer, you need to be fluent in the numbers and KPIs that are representative of your organisation’s success.
Before you send your next email, ask yourself:
- What is the goal of your email marketing?
- Do you want to grow your subscriber database, generate more leads, convert more existing leads into customers, or all of the above?
You can have more than one goal, however, the key is to figure out which metrics you’ll need to track in order to measure and track your progress towards achieving those goal.
1. Opens
The open rate is calculated by taking the unique opens and dividing it by the total number of emails sent. We suggest using unique opens as it ensures, regardless of how many times a single person opens your email to look back at its contents, it will only count as one open.
Factors that influence this metric include the attractiveness of the subject line, and more importantly, deliverability. The more emails that end up in SPAM, are bounced, or marked as a complaint, the fewer the opportunities to be opened.
It’s often debated that open rates should not be used in isolation to determine overall email marketing performance, especially when opens can be overstated by Hotmail’s default feature of marking emails as open automatically upon scrolling the inbox.
2. Clicks
Once you’ve analysed how many people are opening your emails, the next step would be to look at how many actually click. The click rate is calculated as:
Again, the click rate only takes into account all of the inbox actions, and while it shows an email’s overall performance driven by factors such as subject lines, the “from” field, and send day and time, it does not evaluate the content of an email. To measure email content performance, marketers look to the Click-to-open rate that only includes the actions of those who have opened an email :
Pick the clicks KPI you want to measure based on what you want to optimise – would it be outside, or inside the email?
3. Conversions
The conversion rate is the percentage of subscribers who complete a goal: Downloaded an eBook, subscribed to your newsletter, or more sales related like added to cart, or purchase made. This is an important metric to track as it indicates the return on investment from your email marketing efforts and is calculated like so:
Opens, Clicks and Conversions make up your ‘Engagement Metrics’.
- Each of these metrics represents a different type of engagement which will help you assess how effective your campaigns are at engaging your audience.
- Open rates are linked to subject line performance, the credibility of the sender, and the time the campaign was sent; click rates, on the other hand, are indicative of how well the content resonates with the audience and the relevance of the message.
On the topic of engagement, two other metrics that are important to look at when maintaining healthy engagement is the Bounce rate and Email deliverability rate.
4. Bounce Rate
- Hard & Soft Bounce Rate – The fewer bounces, both hard (e.g. the email address doesn’t exist) and soft (e.g. the email inbox is full) the higher your Engagement Score.
5. Unsubscribe Rate
- Unsubscribe – The fewer unsubscribes and people hitting the Spam button, the higher your Engagement Score.
6. List Growth Rate
While you maintain your existing database of subscribers, it is just as important to top up a stream of new and engaged subscribers into your marketing funnel. To ascertain if you are growing a robust database of subscribers, use the following formula:
The bottom line is to be aware and pick the metrics you’re tracking, and ensure you’re able to effectively measure the individual email campaign performance, the health of your email list, and your progress toward reaching your overall or high-level business goals. As long as you have clarity over each of those, you’re on the right track towards effective email marketing.
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