Email Marketing Analytics to Track and Measure
There is a lot to be said when it comes to doing an email marketing campaign well. We could talk here about the most critical components when optimizing an email, the most common errors when preparing them or examples of brilliant campaigns. But in the end, it does not matter how optimized your emails are if you do not see the result of your efforts or reflected in your goals.
This is where tracking and measuring your email marketing analytics can help you. By doing this, you could effectively analyze what’s working and what’s not and optimize your campaign accordingly.
So before sending your next email, stop for a second to think and ask yourself: What is the purpose of this email?
Is it expanding my database? Generating more leads?
Whatever your goal, the next step is to specify what metrics you will need to track to determine if they are making progress in achieving your goals. Once you define this, you will have a better idea of what metrics need to be tracked and analyzed in order to get the most out of your campaigns and email marketing strategy.
Email Marketing Analytics to Track and Measure
You are investing time and money into this endeavor and naturally want to be certain that your investments are being executed efficiently and successfully. However, for those who are just beginning to understand the value of email marketing metrics, this can prove to be difficult.
What should be measured? What do you need to pay attention to?
Once again, knowing what email metrics are important to track and measure will be dependent on your overall goal. If you want to be able to track your metrics and analytics, then you will need to use some sort of platform that has these features.
Short of getting one custom-built for your business, you can use an email service provider such as ConvertKit or GetResponse and be able to study these metrics accordingly.
Let’s take a look at some key email marketing KPIs that you can track and measure during your campaigns:
Email Marketing Analytics to Track
Number of Successful Deliveries
How many of your emails are actually getting through?
This indicates the emails that have arrived correctly to the subscriber. You can measure the quality of your database if you have a high percentage of failed deliveries.
This is one of the most important factors to consider when analyzing the successes and failures of your email marketing campaign. It isn’t just enough to send your emails out into the world. You certainly want to make sure they are reaching people to begin with.
Understanding the number of successful deliveries is one of the first things you will want to study in greater detail.
Number of Messages Read (Open Rate)
This is the percentage of people who have received the email and have opened it.
Most email marketing professionals are still striving to optimize the issues of their emails to achieve higher opening rates. While this can have a positive impact since a large number of openings is always great news, you should focus your efforts on optimizing the open rate.
Knowing the number of users who have opened the email is crucial to analyzing your email subject lines. Some people will open your email because they can see it’s from you, but most will do so because the subject line has enticed them to.
Number of Clicks (Click Through Rate)
You can know this according to the number of visits obtained on the landing pages. These pages are where the subscribers are directed to when they click on a link within the message.
Once the campaign is finished you can analyze your data and modify all the points that can be improved in order to optimize the continuity of your business and launch of future campaigns.
The CTR is also used to determine the results of the A/B tests, which are used to find out the best ways to get a user to click through. This ratio is very important since it shows how many of your subscribers are interacting with your content, a very important metric for tracking email marketing analytics.
Forward Rate
This one gets overlooked fairly often.
Forwarding is the percentage of emails received that forwarded your email to someone they know. If you get forwarded an email from a friend, are you more likely to read it?
This is a great metric because it means your subscriber found your newsletter content so awesome that they had to share it.
How is it calculated: (Number of clicks on share buttons / Total number of emails sent) x 100
Example: 100 clicks in sharing emails / 10,000 emails sent x 100 = 1% forward rate.
Churn Rate
The churn rate or cancellation rate is the percentage of customers who unsubscribe from a subscription list or any other type of database. In short, they are the customers that you have lost and are no longer in your conversion funnel.
When calculating it, it is very important to take into account the time factor. You can rely on this simple formula:
Number of subscribers lost during a period of time / Number of subscribers that we had at the beginning of the period.
For example, if you had 100 subscribers at the beginning of the month and you have lost 3 of them, your monthly churn rate would be 3%.
It is very important to take into account the period to which the data refers and always compare periods that are equal to each other (customer cancellation rate per month, per quarter, per year).
It is difficult to give reference rates for the churn rate since they depend a lot on the sector and the particular circumstances of each brand. As a general guide, more than 15% is considered alarming.
Email Marketing Analytics to Measure
Growth Rate
The rate that indicates that your email list is growing.
How is it calculated: (Number of new subscribers) – (Number of unsubscribers + email in spam) / Total of emails delivered x 100
Example: (500 new subscribers – 100 downloads / spam) / 10,000 emails inboxed x 100 = 4% growth.
Bounce Rate
The percentage of total emails sent that have not been received in the user’s inbox.
How it is calculated: (Total number of bounced emails / number of emails sent) x 100
Example: 75 bounced emails / 10,000 emails sent x 100 = 0.75% bounce rate.
There are 2 types of bounces: “strong” and “soft”.
The “soft bounce” is the result of a temporary problem with a valid email, for example, a full inbox or a problem with the recipient’s server.
The “strong bounce” is the result of an invalid or non-existent email and these emails will never be sent successfully. Having too much bounce rate of this type can cause your company to be considered a spammer in the eyes of the email service providers.
24-Hour Performance
How are your emails performing? While analytics can show you this data in a variety of forms, it is particularly important to focus on those first twenty-four hours. As is so often the case in life, that is the most crucial period of time.
That is where you will likely determine whether or not your email marketing efforts are successful. The first few hours are naturally the most valuable, in terms of momentum, but the entire period should ultimately be examined.
If your 24-hour performance period is lackluster, then it stands to reason that something needs to be improved. These results can also be greatly influenced by the time of day you send out your emails so make sure you take this into consideration before you start sending emails.
Revenues And Sales
Obviously, this is going to be an area of particular fascination to you. This is basically your bottom line. It isn’t enough for the emails to simply reach people. That part is the necessary first step, but it’s likely that you want those clicks to generate sales, as well.
Email marketing analytics can show you in no uncertain terms whether or not your emails are creating the sales your business needs. You can break down this information in a number of different ways.
Inactivity
Like the open rate, the low ratio is not a true reflection of the overall health of your email marketing campaigns. Many of the subscribers who are tired of receiving email messages from your brand will not even bother to complete the unsubscribe process. They will simply stop opening your emails.
This is why it is much more effective to measure the subscription rate through the CTR and the conversion rate. With this, you can identify those who do not want to receive your information and remove them from your list.
Location
It goes without saying that email marketing analytics are not just designed to help you understand what is going on in the present. This information can also arm you with insights into what you need to do for the future.
No one should really abandon email marketing, so this information should be used to help you plan your next campaign. Location is a big factor in such analysis. Knowing where you are generating the most attention, in terms of quality and quantity, can prove to be invaluable later on.
General ROI
What it is: The ROI of your email campaigns. In other words, the total income divided by the total spent.
How it is calculated: ($ of additional purchases made – $ invested in the campaign) / $ invested in the campaign] x 100
Example: ($1000 in additional purchases – $100 invested in the campaign / $100 invested in the campaign) x 100 = 900% return on investment in the campaign.
As is often the case with marketing in any form or fashion, you want the ROI to be greater than what you actually spent. Email marketing analytics can show you just how close you are coming to achieving the ROI that you have in mind.
Remember that this is going to be the total revenue divided by how much you actually spent. These are the metrics that will help you to understand whether or not your email marketing is truly getting results.