It’s important to measure email marketing when running campaigns.
Email marketing platforms, such as DailyStory, include built-in analytics tools you can use to understand how your emails are performing.
The good news is that email marketing is easy to measure.
Most email marketing services, including DailyStory, include built-in email analytics you can use to track and understand how well your emails are performing.
By measuring things like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, you can quickly learn what’s working, what isn’t, and how you should adjust future emails accordingly.
The following are seven ways to measure email marketing campaigns.
Open rate
Your open rate is the percentage of people who opened your marketing email. This gives you an idea about the quality of your email list. For example, if you emailed 10,000 people, and only five opened your message, you may not be talking to people who are actually interested in hearing from your business.
It also helps you understand which of your email subject lines is working best. Subject lines are important because a good subject line lets recipients know what an email is about and entices them to open it.
Increase your email open rates with these 8 strategies.
Click-through rate
Your click-through rate measures the percentage of people who clicked on a link in your email. If your links are a bridge to where you want your customers to go, you can think of CTR as the percentage of people who crossed the bridge.
CTR is a great way to judge the effectiveness of your content. For example, if most of your recipients clicked an email link to a special promotion on your website, it’s likely that people are excited about your promotion.
Additionally, CTR is a good overall barometer of how useful, timely, or interesting your emails are to your audience. If lots of people are clicking on your links, chances are you’re sending them information that they care about. On the other hand, if your CTR is low, you may be sending emails to people at a time when they don’t need them, sending them to those who don’t want them or including information about your business that isn’t particularly useful to them.
Try to limit the number of links or actionable buttons in your emails to only the most important things you want people to react to. Too many links or buttons in an email can be confusing to readers.
Increase your email click rate with these 9 strategies.
Conversion rate
Your conversion rate is the percentage of people who perform the specific action you want them to take after reading your email. It’s a bit more involved than open rate and CTR, but it’s one of the most valuable email marketing metrics for your business.
What counts as a conversion depends on what your business’s goals are for an email. If you’re looking to drum up more reviews for your website, a recipient’s action becomes a conversion when they leave you a review. If you want them to purchase a last-minute Valentine’s Day gift for someone special, their action becomes a conversion when they hit the “purchase” button on your online store and check out.
That’s why conversion rate is so important: It gives you a clear, direct understanding of the measurable impact that your email marketing is having.
View our 16 tips to increase your sales conversion rate.
Unsubscribe rate
The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of people who asked to be unsubscribed from your email list after getting your email.
It’s normal for a small percentage of your customers to unsubscribe after an email — their needs change, they may have overflowing inboxes or they might not be interested anymore in whatever led them to your brand in the first place.
However, if you suddenly see a large spike in people unsubscribing after one (or a few) of your emails, take note. It can be an important clue about what type of content, language, design or offers to avoid sending in the future.
Bounce rate
To measure how effective your emails are, don’t forget to look beyond the actual email itself. You can check the bounce rate on the corresponding landing pages your emails are linking to.
Bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors who land on your page but end up leaving immediately without doing anything else. When your email campaigns point to landing pages, bounce rate can help you determine if the message and landing page line up.
View what causes bounced emails and tips to lower your bounce rates.
Email list growth rate
Is your email list growth progressing? Or, is it falling off?
The effectiveness of your email marketing will have an effect on the size of your email list. If your emails are ineffective, your list size will decrease as old customers unsubscribe faster than new ones sign up.
On the flip side, if your emails are relevant and engaging for your audience, your list size will stay steady or grow.
Return on investment
At the end of the day, your email marketing efforts need to drive revenue for your business. So, it’s important to track the ROI (return on investment) for your email campaigns.
Identify the dollar amount of additional sales made from your email campaign. Then, subtract the total money you invested in that campaign.
If the resulting amount is positive, your campaign was successful in general. If it is negative, then it was not profitable. Of course, you can dig deeper by determining your ROI rate, which is the percentage of profit generated. It’s one thing to make a profit. It’s another to make a certain amount of profit that you set a goal for before the email campaign even begins.
In conclusion
Your email marketing campaigns can deliver results for your business. However, you must track these important metrics along the way to best optimize your campaigns and pivot when necessary.
Check out our 11 do’s and don’ts of email marketing.
