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4 Key Metrics to Track for Email Marketing Success
Gauging the success of your email marketing campaign is important. If you don’t track essential metrics, implementing future improvements will be a challenge. Only through careful tracking can you target areas of weakness and resolve them. This is why it’s so essential that you know the metrics to track for email marketing during your campaigns.
For marketers looking to dig deeper into metrics and tracking, learning the ropes can feel overwhelming. With so many pieces of data to consider, which areas most require your focus? Which metrics ultimately deliver results?
In this article, you’ll learn about the most valuable metrics to track for email marketing. With this knowledge, you can streamline your campaigns and fine-tune your marketing strategy.
Metrics to track for email marketing
The metrics below should become a regular part of your analysis toolkit. They provide clear insight into what’s working and what needs to be improved with your email marketing campaigns.
Once you’ve examined the data, you can start working on your next campaign with these important pieces of information in mind.
1. What is your open rate?
The open rate is one of the most important and most basic pieces of email marketing information you can track. Simply put, an open rate is the number of people that open your emails. Observe the total number of emails sent, remove undeliverable emails and emails that bounced, and then consider how many people actually opened your message. This is your open rate.
Depending on your industry, the average open rate for an email marketing campaign should be in the 15% to 25% range. If you’re falling below this average, consider how you’re writing your subject lines. They may be too long, unclear, or perhaps they require more of a hook.
On the other hand, if you’re seeing strong open rates but no increased sales, then there may be a problem elsewhere. An open rate indicates whether or not the initial response was successful. Your campaign can be somewhat successful but still have issues to resolve.
Finally, tracking open rates is important because it can reveal trends over time. Are subscribers opening fewer and fewer emails? This could show that they are becoming fatigued.
Open rates can also reveal which types of emails garner the best response from clients, allowing you to focus on those messages in the future. Open rates can also be used in combination with other data, allowing you to build a full picture of your strategy’s success.
As you can see, with open rates, one small piece of data can tell a very big story, making it one of the most important metrics to track for email marketing.
2. Looking closely at the click rate
After you have looked at open rate, you will want to consider the click rate success of your email campaign. This measures how many subscribers opened the email, then clicked through to the website.
On average, about 4% of people will actually opt to click through. Of course, this largely depends on your open rate, which is why tracking both metrics continues to be essential.
As you use the open rate and click rate in combination, you’ll learn about your campaign. A strong open rate indicates that the initial message was convincing. A strong click rate indicates that the email copy is effective, and this can be verified by monitoring your website’s traffic.
Therefore, if you have a high open rate and click rate, but still no sales, then this may indicate there is something preventing people from making a purchase. Is the layout friendly and easy to use? Are the offers competitive with other similar websites? Perhaps you’re noticing high abandoned cart numbers, which may indicate problems during checkout.
By monitoring open rate and click rate, you can effectively target the area where you’re experiencing a bottleneck in your marketing funnel.
Source: Really Good Emails
3. How frequently are people unsubscribing?
Part of creating a successful email marketing campaign is ensuring the health of your email list. While attrition is to be expected with any email marketing list, you should be able to grow your list faster than it can shrink.
Ideally, unsubscribe rates should be as close to 0% as possible. Anything below 0.5% is around the average rates of unsubscribes. Once you start creeping higher, you may want to look at trends and see if specific types of emails are causing a bump in unsubscribe rates or if it is a sustained trend over time.
Spikes in unsubscribe rates may suggest that recipients felt the email they had read was irrelevant to them or unnecessary. This can be resolved by segmenting your subscribers and targeting emails that will appeal to each segment rather than blasting every email to every single subscriber.
A continuing trend of high unsubscribe rates could indicate subscriber fatigue. Again, this can be combated with better personalization. Also, you may want to assess your email copy. Are the emails adding value when people view them? How strong is your message or offer?
If people feel the value is lacking, they will unsubscribe.
Source: Really Good Emails
4. Earnings per email
Of course, marketing is about making money. If you are in the black after accounting for expenses, then you’ve made a profit, and that’s much better than the alternative. But how do you measure which marketing campaigns have been successful and which ones haven’t?
This a relatively simple metric to calculate, but it’s very important. With this data, you can accomplish two things. First, you can compare the ROI of this campaign with other campaigns and allocate your future spending accordingly. Secondly, it also shows whether the campaign was a success or a failure within the scope of your goals.
To pinpoint earnings per email, simply divide the total earnings from people who purchased through your email link, then divide that number by the total number of emails sent. This provides your campaign with a necessary dollars and cents number, which you can compare to other campaigns.
Additionally, you can see what offers, designs, images, and copy seem to drive the highest sales. If a campaign proves to have high earnings per email metric, then you can dig deeper and learn why customers responded so strongly.
Metrics to track for email marketing: the tools you need
Now that you know a few of the most important metrics to track for email marketing, you hopefully have a better understanding of what makes a campaign successful. More importantly, you can now get a more complete picture of your marketing efforts, and hopefully, your next campaign will gain even better results.
Tracking these metrics should be done after every single campaign whether it was deemed a success or a failure. Over time, you can compare metrics to identify problems, solutions, and aspects of your marketing that resonate with your subscribers.
Want to start creating better email marketing campaigns? Campaign Monitor gives you all of the tools you need to track important metrics, create beautiful email marketing campaigns, and give you the best ROI for your marketing dollars.
Best of all, you can try Campaign Monitor for free to get a sense for just how powerful the tools are. Ready to become a better marketer? Make your next email marketing campaign your best campaign yet with Campaign Monitor.
