Measuring email marketing success: how do you do it?
Over 50% of small businesses utilise email marketing to reach customers
With 4 billion daily email users, it’s no surprise that it’s widely used as a tool to nurture leads, encourage conversions and distribute content.
But, how do you measure if an email marketing campaign is a success?
An easy guide to direct response marketing
How to identify key email marketing metrics
A key performance indicator (KPI) is what a business uses to track the success rates of its marketing (or sales) efforts.
Some common examples are the lifetime value of a customer, the number of new users that visit a website and even brand awareness across social media.
Email KPI’s to measure success
- Open Rates (% of people who open an email)
This is the number of email recipients who saw your email and clicked open to read it. It’s a percentage calculated based on the number of delivered emails that were actually opened.
Average open rates can vary depending on industries, target customers and even the type of email. An email open rate of above 15% is usually considered good.
If you’re consistently getting lower open rates, it might indicate that you need to up your email marketing game.
Easy ways to improve your open rate for email marketing
1. Make your subject lines more relevant
They should be relevant to the contents of your email, your business and even the recipient.
2. Segment your customer lists
Breaking your customers down into appropriate groups based on things like purchase history and interests can help make your emails more relevant to the recipient.
3. Write more enticing email subject lines
Make sure that your email actually makes the recipient want to open the email and read more. Including an emoji (if appropriate to your business and the subject of the email) can actually dramatically increase your email marketing open rate!
4. Make sure your email marketing list is made up of your target customers
If you are still not getting improved open rates, it might be your subscriber list that is the problem. It’s worth taking a look at your lead magnets to make sure they’re attracting the type of people who are likely to end up becoming customers.
How to improve your email marketing campaign
- Email Bounce Rate
Not to be confused with a website bounce rate, for emails it refers to the percentage of emails that were sent but were not delivered for whatever reason. Usually, a mistyped email is the main culprit for getting emails bounced back.
It’s important to make sure your bounce rate stays low as many email service providers look at things like your average bounce rate to determine your reputation.
- Email Marketing Return on Investment (ROI)
This is one of the most important metrics as it usually directly affects the success of the business.
You need to make sure that you are always getting back more than you’re putting in.
It is calculated based on the number of sales generated by the email marketing campaign minus the total cost to create your email emails.
- Email Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
This metric looks at the number of recipients who received your email and subsequently clicked on a link within it.
This helps offer a quick snapshot of the customer engagement your emails are generating.
It also helps to inform your next email marketing campaign by showing what your audience was more likely to be interested in and interact with.
- Email Conversion Rate
This is the percentage of email recipients that clicked on a link and completed your desired process or action.
For example, a customer receives an abandoned cart email and upon receiving the email goes on to complete the order process.
Although isn’t always connected to an immediate purchase and can be a customer signing up to attend a webinar or build a wish list.
This offers a quick snapshot of the health of your email marketing campaign. Having a high number of unsubscribes can show that your email may not be engaging or relevant enough.
- Unsubscribe Rate
Although, the main cause of unsubscribes is usually the recipient receiving email contact more often than they’d like.
How Copper Bay Digital can help improve your email marketing campaign.
We have a talented digital team that can work with you to improve your digital presence.
We offer a range of digital marketing services where we can work with you to identify the right channel mix for your business and customers.
