Join Dataflo @ SaaS Insider's India 2022 on May 26 - 27
Register Now
Email marketing has evolved considerably over the years. Starting from Ray Tomlinson, who sent the first email in 1971 to this day’s modern era of communication. Email marketing has become one of the most trusted forms of marketing.
It thus becomes imperative to measure the effectiveness of any email marketing campaign you’re going for. As such, marketers must recognize the significance of email marketing analytics.
This blog is all about the basic but important metrics every marketer should be tracking for better understanding of your email campaigns’ performance
Your marketing dashboard is the centrepiece of your digital marketing campaigns. As a matter of fact, it is a hub that houses all your marketing related information.
And so as you make changes and tweaks to your campaigns, it's essential to track certain key metrics of your marketing efforts. As email marketers, it's important that you keep an eye on the data that can help you grow your email list, increase conversions and make more revenue.
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach and engage customers. It’s also one of the easiest digital marketing strategies to get started with.
89% of marketers use email as the primary channel for generating leads.
It’s cheap – compared to other marketing channels like PPC or display ads, email is relatively inexpensive. You can start small and grow into it over time without having large amounts of budget right away.
It’s easy – doing email campaigns doesn’t require much technical knowledge or coding skills; anyone can do them!
So with this powerful yet personal marketing tool, what are the metrics should you be keeping a watchful eye on? Let’s explore.
Every marketer should know their email open rate as it’s a key metric when measuring the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. An email open rate shows how many people opened an email message.
After all, the first step to get people to read your message is to get them to open your email. A good open rate according to Campaign Monitor is 17- 28% although industry averages vary depending on the specific industry.
You can calculate the open rate by dividing the number of total opens by the total number of emails sent and multiplying it by 100.
Building trust, increasing value and packaging your message in a way your target audience likes to consume are the three pillars of running a successful email marketing campaign.
Here is the list of email marketing tools that you can use as a small business to get up and running right away -
In the above section when we spoke to you about the open rate, you must have noticed that to calculate your open rate you need to know to remove the number of bounces from the total email sent.
A bounce rate is the percentage of emails that are returned to the sender due to an invalid address or account. The bounce rate for an email campaign is calculated by dividing the number of bounces by the number of emails sent, then multiplying by 100.
For example, if you send 100 emails and 10 of them bounce back, your bounce rate would be 10%.
More often than not, your email campaigns are executed with a clear goal in mind. It could be to generate more conversions, encourage product adoption, remind users about product offers; in a more early phase of marketing, this could be to encourage and nurture potential leads to sign-up for your product.
Just as in paid marketing, email marketing also tracks CTR that is the percentage of number of people who clicked on at least link out of the total emails delivered
CTR = (Number of clicks / Number of total emails delivered) X 100
When your CTR (Click-through-rate) is high, you can be confident that your email hygiene and deliverability are good. Jordan Pritikin, the Email and Growth Marketing Manager at HubSpot notes that - "I look at clickthrough rate to get a high-level understanding of how my email performed overall. Since CTR accounts for deliverability, subject line performance, and how your email's content performed, it's a good metric to look at when I need a quick glance at how my email performed overall."
On the other hand CTOR (Click-through-open-rate) refers to the percentage of the number of people who clicked on at least one link in your email out of the total opened emails.
CTOR = (Number of clicks / Number of total emails opened) X 100
This metric focuses more on how many people find your content engaging and increasing your ROI by helping develop an email body that resonates with your audience.
You can measure your conversion rate by tracking if and when your subscribers take the desired action after reading your email by completing a goal such as capturing leads, soliciting a response, or completing a purchase.
Just like CTR and CTOR, measuring Conversion rate is also nuanced. It can be measured using two different sets of formulas based on the element you think is effective in your email campaign -
A spam complaint occurs when a recipient flags your email as spam (or junk) and reports it to their provider.
Jumping the spam hoop and ensuring that emails don't get caught in the crosshairs is the dream of every marketer. It's important to track this metric because it gives you insight into how your subscribers feel about your emails, and whether or not they're reading them.
Having a higher number of emails marked spam not only means that your clients no longer want to see your messages as they think it is annoying, but it also harms your domain because ESPs gather information about users to better understand what emails provide value, and punish organizations that dump salesy junk on recipients. In this case, it will identify your business as one of those companies.
A spam rate of less than 1% is considered acceptable by most email marketing service providers (ESPs).
Spam complaint rate = Number of recipients who mark it your message as spam / Total number of email recipients
We definitely can’t deny the significance of a well-crafted email message to your customers.
However, if you can’t see the results of your efforts, or measure whether your email is helping you hit your goals—it’s time to embrace a different approach.
Moreover, with so many channels to pay attention to and competitors constantly getting smarter, you need to stay on top of your email marketing game.
Aligning your business goals with key metrics is a good idea and simple and strong calls-to-action thus become pivotal.
Get in touch with Dataflo and visualize all your important Email Marketing Metrics on our live customizable dashboards today!
After all, “That which is measured improves. That which is measured and reported improves exponentially.“ – Karl Pearson
Santhoshi is a content marketer turned product marketer. When she's not thinking about marketing, she's thinking about her 6-year-old daughter and what to make for dinner for the second night in a row (she's an avid vegetarian). She loves writing, Netflix, reading, and spending time with her sprightly 6-year-old. She loves her coffee strong!
