Email Analytics: Email-Marketing Analytics That Matter
Looking to improve email campaign performance and your overall email-marketing return on investment (ROI)? Are you trying to get more clicks and conversions? If so, the best place to start is by identifying the key performance indicators (KPIs) that are most important to your business. Then, you’ll want to identify and focus on the email-marketing metrics that must be improved to support your KPIs.
Email-Marketing Tracking—Take Your Email Marketing to the Next Level by Optimizing These Email KPIs
When it comes to email tracking and email analysis, there are myriad metrics and email KPIs to consider. Which ones are most important for taking your email-marketing program to the next level? The first step in answering that question is to determine your primary email-marketing goals. For example, are you trying to increase your online sales, drive more people to your website, grow your email list with highly qualified leads, or convert new leads into loyal customers? Whichever of these is most important to you, develop a set of email KPIs that directly relate to how you measure ROI. Here are some examples:
- Revenue attributed to the email-marketing channel
- Website visits tagged back to clicks from your email campaigns
- Orders (i.e., conversions) resulting directly from your email campaigns
Establishing a primary email-marketing goal will help you narrow down which metrics you need to measure.
Next, you’ll want to identify the email metrics that you can easily track as you begin optimizing your campaigns. The following are the top 10 email metrics every email marketer should consider tracking. By monitoring these metrics, you’ll be able to determine whether you are doing the right things to drive the improvements in your email KPIs:
- Open Rate—This email metric is a measurement of the first level of subscriber engagement. After all, if you don’t get subscribers to open your emails, they’re not going to click or convert. The email open rate is a good indicator of whether your subject lines are effective at conveying the value of your email content and offer. It also lets you know if your email messages are resonating with your target audience.
- Click-Through Rate—How many unique people were engaged enough to click on one or more links in your email message? That’s what the unique click-through rate tells you. A high click-through rate indicates that your email content is relevant to your target audience. If you have a high open rate that is accompanied by a low click-through rate, you’re likely doing a good job of generating interest in your emails; however, the content and offers aren’t resonating with your subscribers.
- Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR)—This email metric tells you how effective your email-marketing message is in terms of motivating recipients to click a call-to-action link once they’ve opened your email. It’s also a valuable email metric to assess your offers and calls to action. To determine your CTOR for an email campaign, divide the number of unique individuals who clicked by the unique number of people who opened. Imagine that you do an Adwords campaign that adds 1,000 people to your list of 100,000. Also, imagine that those new people don’t continue to engage much at all. Mathematically speaking, the unique click-through rate will drop. But if your CTOR remains the same, your email campaigns are likely still performing well and engaging those who open.
- Email-Marketing Conversion Rate—This email metric tells you how many of the subscribers you sent an email to clicked all the way through to complete the desired conversion. For example, the conversion could be making a purchase online, signing up for a webinar, completing a survey, downloading such resources as white papers and ebooks, or subscribing to your email newsletter. Effective calls to action, great offers, and dedicated and optimized landing pages, as well as creating more personalized emails, all contribute to higher email conversion rates.
- Bounce Rate—In your email-marketing reports, this metric represents the percentage of recipients whose email addresses were rejected by the receiving server. The bounce rate is further broken down into “soft” bounces and “hard” bounces. A soft bounce is usually temporary—caused by a network problem or a full mailbox—and the email will eventually be delivered. However, a hard bounce will never be delivered and is returned to the email server because of an invalid email address (e.g., due to typos). If you have a high bounce rate, it may indicate that you need to clean up your list to ensure that email addresses are current and accurate.
- Spam Rate—The spam rate tells you the percentage of subscribers who have marked your emails as spam or junk. Why do people who requested to receive your emails mark your emails as spam? There are many possible reasons, but some of those most frequently cited include subscribers couldn’t easily unsubscribe from a brand’s email list or the company was sending too many irrelevant emails. Be sure to check out the following NewsLever feature for tips to prevent your subscribers from hitting the spam button in your email campaigns: “7 Tips to Keep Subscribers From Marking Your Emails as Spam.”
- Unsubscribe Rate—The unsubscribe rate tells you the percentage of subscribers who decided to “opt out” from receiving your emails. Two major reasons why your email campaigns generate high unsubscribe rates are that your subscribers don’t find value in the email content and/or you are sending them too many emails too often.
- Email List Growth Rate—How fast is your email list growing each year? That’s what this email metric tells you. It is calculated by taking the number of new subscribers, minus the number of unsubscribes and spam complaints, divided by the total number of email addresses on your list. Due to list attrition, typical email lists lose as much as 25% each year. When implementing strategies to grow your email list, keep in mind that quality trumps quantity. Click here for tips on how to build a bigger, better email list.
- Email Sharing Rate—This email KPI lets you know how many of your email recipients shared your message by forwarding it or clicking a social share button within the email on such social media sites as Facebook and Twitter. It’s calculated by dividing the total number of emails forwarded and shared by the total number of emails delivered. In addition to showing that your subscribers are highly engaged with your email content, a high email sharing rate indicates that your email campaigns are generating referrals and helping to support the growth of your email list. Click here for tips on how to optimize your referral campaigns.
- Email-Marketing ROI—This is one of the most important email metrics to track because it lets you know how cost-effective your overall email-marketing program is, as well as how email compares to your other marketing channels. Be sure to check out FulcrumTech’s free and easy-to-use ROI Goalsetter tool that can help you get the most out of your email-marketing dollars. It allows you to easily adjust key metrics to determine which improvements will have the biggest impact on your bottom line. In addition, click here for 7 surefire ways to help boost your email ROI.
How Do Your Email Campaign Analytics Compare?
Check out MailChimp’s 2017 Email Marketing Benchmark’s report to see how your email-marketing campaign metrics and email KPIs stack up to the email-marketing resume of companies that are similar in size and in the same industry.
Tracking Email Metrics Is Essential to Your Email-Marketing Success
Tracking your email-marketing data is vital to making the most-informed decisions for your email campaigns. Most email service providers will provide some or all of the above metrics. For those not readily available, it is typically possible to calculate them by downloading performance data and leveraging Excel to transform and calculate the desired metrics. If you feel overwhelmed with organizing and analyzing your email campaign metrics, FulcrumTech created an email analytics dashboard, called IntelliSents, that does all of the heavy lifting for you. IntelliSents is an online email analytics platform that presents email performance and deliverability trends over time of more than 25 of the most important email-marketing metrics, including open, click-through, bounce, and unsubscribe rates. This is the same tool we use to help identify opportunities to increase engagement, drive more clicks and conversions, and optimize ROI for our clients.
Contact the email-marketing experts at FulcrumTech today for a free IntelliSents demo and to learn more about what you can do to effectively track email-marketing analytics, conduct a thorough marketing campaign analysis, and optimize your email campaigns in 2018.