Email marketing can quite possibly be the best possible marketing strategy for your business. An effective email strategy can have the potential to convert prospects into customers and engage first time buyers into becoming recurring customers.
Although some businesses feel that email marketing isn’t important and neglect using it as a strategy, 59% of businesses believe that their email marketing strategy has a strong influence on consumer purchasing decisions and that 73% of consumers prefer communications via email, according to a recent study published by Hubspot.
Right now, email marketing is now more important than ever before as the strategy is very much still going strong today. With that being said, many businesses fail to understand which basic metrics are important to take into consideration and how they can track the results of an email marketing campaign.
In this blog, we’ll be taking a look at which basic email marketing metrics are important to focus on and how to track the success of your email marketing campaign.
Email Open Rate
When distributing email campaigns to your audience, you’ll want to gain an insight into how well your subscribers are receiving your email and message. Open rates are the most simple KPI as they track how many subscribers opened your email with an insight into how many recipients either ignored or deleted the email without opening it.
A smart way to improve open rates is to address the subscriber by having their name in the subject line copy to grab their attention. It can also really help to use short and snappy subject lines by keeping them direct. Using emojis really does help, too! 🎉
Email Click-Through Rate (CTR)
If the purpose of your campaign is to encourage sessions on your website, it is well worth monitoring your email click-through rate which shows how many subscribers have clicked on the links provided in your email.
To improve your click-through rate, you should add compelling call-to-actions in the form of buttons throughout the email copy to make it easier for your subscribers to read and find what they are looking for.
Conversion Rate
Conversions are classed as a user completing a specific action on your website, whether it be making a purchase or submitting an enquiry through a contact form.
If you intend to use email marketing to encourage more purchases and enquiries through your website, then you should be paying close attention to your email conversion rates. This metric provides a true insight into your return on investment and whether or not your marketing strategy is paying off!
Return on Investment (ROI)
Return on Investment is another key metric to track, this will show you your overall results based on the money you have invested into the campaign. Although, it’s important to understand that you have to be patient and some consumers will wait several weeks before committing to buying in.
Unsubscribe Rate
If you’re looking to encourage awareness of your brand and increase your following, unsubscribe rates are one to watch. Unsubscribe rates can indicate how many subscribers have opted out of receiving your emails, which can indicate that they are no longer interested or that you may be sending emails too frequently.
One way to reduce your unsubscribe rate is to tailor your email campaigns so that they are delivered to the right people and at the right time. This can be made really easy through having grouped lists/audiences of type of people based on their demographic, industry or interests, and tailoring the email copy to each list/audience.
Bounce Rates
For more important messages that need to be made to your subscribers, it’s important to measure bounce rates, which relate to how many of the email addresses you have on file were unable to receive your message due to incorrectly spelt email addresses, full mailboxes or even problems with the server.
Using bounce rates as a metric will help you to analyse the quality of your subscriber lists and helps you keep track of how many subscribers will be receiving your emails and how many should be removed from your email list. A useful way to avoid bounce rates is to request subscribers to double opt-in so that they can verify their email address in order to be added to your subscriber list.
Organic List Growth
Wanting to check month-on-month progress with your email campaign strategy? Well, it may be worth taking into account how your subscriber list has grown over time and how many subscribers (on average) sign up every month or year.
On this note, it’s also important to have an automated email workflow setup that welcomes any new subscribers to your mailing list!
Measure Your Email Campaign Strategy
Email marketing campaigns deliver compelling, engaging and targeted experiences and messages to a wide audience of prospects and existing customers. To get a better understanding of how your email marketing campaigns are impacting your business, analysing your metrics should be at the forefront of your strategy.
At Digital Ethos, we look after the entire email marketing campaign, from set up through to delivery and measurement. We produce original and relevant messages, that’s applicable to your audience, no matter what lifecycle stage they’re at.