Knowing how to measure the success of email marketing is crucial in determining what is working and what needs improvement. Entrepreneurs and marketers have nearly endless choices for advertising their goods and services.
And there is always a new technology that you can employ, whether it is different types of advertising on social networks, or chatbots, which are rising in popularity.
Next is the old-fashioned “email marketing” that has been with us for 40 years this year.
Did you know that the first mass mailing was delivered by Gary Thuerk to 400 contacts in 1978 and made him $13 million at the time – $78.8 million today? ( source )
During that period, many firms have already learned to connect with their consumers using email. Because of this, our email boxes are bombarded with a lot of “irresistible” offers every day.
With this steady growth of newsletters, it’s growing more and more difficult to stand out and catch your recipient’s attention.
For that reason, it is important to decorate each email and each campaign appropriately and pay maximum attention to it.
There are loads of tools at your disposal, from A/B testing to response emails to assessing what people do with emails.
Monitoring and reviewing data is not exactly our fantasy of all of us. In this manner, a person learns about the success of what he does, and above all, he may enhance what he will do.
How many people really got the newsletter? How many people opened it? Who clicked on the link?
I keep receiving newsletters that don’t have tracking built in. And the firms who send them out are fumbling in the dark like a power outage.
The following metrics include everything you can concentrate on to boost the success of your email marketing.
I bet you know some of them and maybe even follow them. On the other hand, I’m sure you remember the saying: ” Repetition is the mother of success .”
#1 Open rate
Available statistics tell you how many recipients opened your newsletter. It’s one of the important figures you should measure with your email marketing.
It is determined as the ratio of the number of opened messages to the number of sent messages.
If you send 100 emails and 25 people open the message, you have a 25% open rate.
Unfortunately, the opening rate is rather inaccurate, so take it with a grain of salt.
What? Why?
Measuring if the recipient has opened the email is done using an invisible picture that is included inside the message. The notion is that the receiver has opened the letter when the picture is displayed.
But certain email applications (Outlook, Thunderbird) or services (List) may block the display of graphics. The receiver opens the message and reads it, but the picture is not loaded and consequently not included in the statistics.
Even with this constraint, the opening rate has a revealing power. If only because you may compare separate campaigns and figure out which one was more effective in terms of opening.
#2 Click through rate
Far more precise than opening monitoring is click tracking. Click-through numbers are incredibly significant for measuring the performance of email marketing.
It is measured as the proportion of messages delivered to messages in which the link was clicked.
Thanks to it, you will discover how many recipients clicked through and got to your website or landing page, to your blog or wherever you send them.
The click-through rate informs you how many people did the action you intended them to do.
The more clicks you receive, the more engagement your contact database gets. This suggests you have individuals in your database who are interested in what you do. They want to see a new deal or read a new blog item.
Email marketing is not about the number. It’s about quality. Your aim should not be database size. But the quality of connections is.
You may acquire a database of 500,000 emails on the illicit market, but if 2 of them were clicked, the question is, what was the purpose? More on this under the risks of purchasing an email address database.
Clouds of variables affect click-through rates. Even if I overlook the substance of the email itself (the topic of an entire book), its structure is crucial.
Today, more than 50% of receivers read emails on mobile.
See how your newsletter appears on a tiny screen. Is it readable? Are the links visible? Can I click on them, or do I have to search for them?
If the links in the message are small and hard to reach, it is probable that they are adversely hurting the click-through rate. The remedy is easy – change the newsletter template and make the links larger. Make it simple for your receivers to read and click, and you’ll enhance your metrics.
#3 Unsubscribe Rate
Statistics that people watch but don’t like. It informs you how many people have unsubscribed from your newsletter.
It is determined as the ratio of unsubscribed contacts to the number of messages sent.
Although the number of unsubscribes is negative, it is a fully normal quantity. You can’t satisfy everyone and always.
It’s a very subtle sign of whether you’ve struck the nail on the head or missed the point with your email marketing.
If the unsubscribe rate is less than 1%, then this is a normal fluctuation of your database, and there is no need to worry about it.
If it’s greater, then you’ve made a mistake, and it’s a good idea to ask yourself the following questions:
Do you have contacts in your database who genuinely know the sender?
Did they sign up for the news freely and voluntarily?
Is the newsletter delivered controversial in any way?
Are you sending one sales offer after another?
Are you delivering communications with a different subject than the one individuals subscribed to?
There might be various reasons for logging out. It doesn’t always work. Rather than brush a high figure under the rug, it’s wiser to investigate it and learn from it for future efforts.
#4 Hard Bounce
The phrase Hard Bounce means “firmly bounce” and is used to reject the delivery of an email message hard.
A harsh rejection will occur if you are sending a message to an email address that does not exist. The person deleted their mailbox, quit employment (common with business addresses), or made a mistake while inputting their email address.
The Hard Bounce number is nice to observe whether you’ve been blogging for a long time or for the first time. In such a situation, it might be more than predicted (on the order of tens of contacts).
The reason to monitor this data is straightforward and vital. If you don’t delete the rejected email address from your database and send additional emails to it, you will ruin your reputation with email providers. This may result in the lesser delivery of all your newsletters.
Fortunately, most recent mailing solutions erase rejected emails from the database automatically.
#5 Soft Bounces
In addition to “hard bounce”, there is also “soft bounce”. A Soft Bounce signifies that the message was not sent, but feel free to try again next time.
This is most typically the case when the receiver has a full email inbox. He may get newsletters and offers from you when he releases them again.
It is also advisable to monitor this quantity and not depend on it to resolve itself. A user may have an email box with which he no longer uses or engages. Then it is futile to write to him, and it is best to delete him from the database.
Look at the Soft Bounce number and the messages that come back to you, and clear your database once in a while.
#6 Deliverability rate
An intriguing statistic compares the Hard, as mentioned earlier, with Soft Bounce. The deliverability rate speaks volumes about your database’s quality and your email marketing strategy.
It is calculated by dividing the total by the number of messages sent after deducting the number of returned messages from the total.
For example, You send 1,000 emails, and 45 bounce back (hard or soft). Therefore the deliverability percentage is 95.5%.
(1.000 – 45) / 1.000 = 0,955 * 100 % = 95,5 %
95.5% is a large percentage at first appearance, but it does not indicate that all of these messages wound up in the recipient’s mailbox.
Some of them get “lost”, some of them wind up in SPAM filters, some of them in the “Junk” folder, and some of them really reach the user. Read our post on how to prevent your email from going to SPAM here.
If you want to guarantee that as many messages as possible wind up in your inbox, you must be selective about what emails you send and to whom.
You develop your reputation with mail clients (email servers such as Gmail, etc.) with each newsletter.
More and more clients have an internal assessment of the sender of the communication. And if the rating is terrible, they ignore and reject the communications from him.
What can you do, then, to earn the best possible reputation with mail customers?
Remove from your database the addresses from which the messages bounce back (Hard and Soft Bounce).
Only send messages to persons who have requested them – don’t spam.
Allow recipients to unsubscribe from subsequent newsletters quickly – so they don’t have to designate the content as spam.
Send messages that recipients will open and click on their links. Applies: The more activity, the greater reputation.
Set up the electronic signature of the domain from which you send emails ( SPF, DKIM, DMARC ).
It’s not magic but a long-term strategy for email marketing.
#7 Spam rate
Spam statistics don’t tell you how many people believe a message is spam or how many people actually tagged it as spam.
Both Gmail and Yahoo, as well as other providers, present the user with an option to report spam. The user clicks on it, and the provider knows to look out for such a sender.
Sometimes the supplier also tells the sender. With a well-set-up mailing tool, clicking such a button will automatically be written to the contact and unsubscribe from the mailing.
When a substantial proportion of receivers label messages as spam, you lower the deliverability of all your emails. You destroy your reputation, and it is extremely tough to recover it back.
How to guarantee that the proportion of “spam reports” is as low as possible?
The solution is fairly straightforward, and you probably know it. 🙂
Send useful information solely to those people who know you and have freely signed up to receive communications.
Forget all types of offers for purchasing databases. It’s a route to hell. They frequently include spam traps.
Spam traps are email accounts that are put up for the express purpose of detecting spam. Once you send a message to such a spam trap, it will severely impact the delivery rate of all email campaigns.
#8 Forwarding statistics
The relatively modest share rate reveals what proportion of receivers forwarded the message—shared it with their friends. He doesn’t follow her simply like that; at the same time, it may be a possible source of new connections.
Thanks to this data, you will know how many individuals were interested in the material enough to want to share it. It definitely doesn’t make sense to count it everywhere, but it makes sense for relevant messages.
So include a link to forward or share on social networks in your mailings. Write a call to action to urge the receiver to share or forward the message.
You may thus quickly and for free reach new connections – new individuals interested in your goods and services.
As you watch the share rate for longer, you will readily realize which subjects the receivers are more interested in and wish to transmit. You will then utilize this to design even better email campaigns.
#9 Churn
The English term Churn means “milking“. Metaphorically, it’s the number of individuals you’ve “milked” the most. 🙂
In strictly practical terms, this is the proportion of contacts that you can no longer utilize for subsequent mailings.
This contains rejected contacts from Hard Bounce. Contacts who flagged your emails as spam. Even contacts who unsubscribed themselves from future subscriptions.
You may compute how many individuals you will lose like this every month and, from that, establish the number of new ones who must register.
But something else lurks behind Churn, and calculating such a metric is no longer particularly straightforward. You can count up the individual numbers of contacts that have unsubscribed or been cancelled. I have no question about it.
What about “dead” contacts?
These are people who get newsletters but do not reply to them in any manner. don’t open or click anything for a long time.
They are also “milked” contacts, and while you have them in the database, you have nothing from them. They are not your customers, and most likely, they will not become one.
It is impossible to calculate the amount of “dead” contacts, but I would say that they comprise 25-30% of the database.
Churn is absolutely not a figure you need to check after every campaign you send. Devote yourself to it once or twice a year during the strategic planning of email marketing.
Numbers aren’t everything.
There are thousands of data, analytics, and KPIs that you may measure and analyze for your email campaigns.
Some are simple, and you can notice them at a glance. Calculating others will easily take many hours.
Did I forget one really critical email marketing statistic? Let me know in the Facebook group! If you know which one. 🙂
Even in the case of email statistics, it is true that too much of anything is dangerous. Evaluation of accomplishment is absolutely important and desirable, but it surely should not immobilize you. There is no need to keep track of all the numbers.
Choose the essential metrics that are crucial to you and measure them often. After a time, you can immediately determine which campaign was effective and when you walked on the wrong side.
Schedule and process exotic statistics, for example, every quarter.
You will not acquire higher numbers in statistics by following them but by committing yourself to the content of mailings, testing and cleaning the database.
I touched on it multiple times. I believe it’s preferable to have a database of quality contacts who know you and open your newsletters than hundreds of thousands of contacts with bad openness.
If you want to see in practice how to get started in email marketing, have a look at this.
