Email marketing is one of the best marketing strategies for businesses looking to develop relationships with their customers and drive more sales. But how do you know if your email strategies are actually working toward those goals? As with any digital marketing strategy, it’s about keeping an eye on key metrics. Here are some of the most important email marketing metrics you should be tracking with any email campaign!
Open Rate
Open rate tracks the percentage of subscribers who open the emails you send. For any campaign, you should be shooting for an average open rate between 15-25%.
If your open rates are low, consider using subscribers’ first names in emails to personalize your messaging. You could also try making subject lines clearer and more concise to better catch the attention of subscribers. A/B testing is a good way to see what works and what doesn’t when trying to improve your open rate. Test out unique subject lines, greetings, or try sending emails at different times of the day or week.
Delivery Percentage
Email delivery percentage indicates the percentage of subscribers that receive your email, whether that’s in a main inbox or a junk folder. For most marketers, a delivery rate of 95% and higher is considered good.
Factors affecting email deliverability can include recipients marking unwanted emails as spam, high bounce rates, and low engagement from subscribers. If your delivery rate starts to drop below 80%, it may be time to start looking at your email lists and removing emails that have a high “undelivered” percentage.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate tracks the percentage of emails that went undelivered to your selected email list. When tracking bounce rate, which should be around 2% for a good campaign, keep in mind that there are two kinds of bounces you can track: soft bounces and hard bounces.
A soft bounce is usually an issue on the recipient’s end that you can’t control. These could be things like the recipient’s mailbox is full, or their mail server is down. With a hard bounce, this is an indication that something is wrong on your end. Maybe the email you’re sending to is fake, or your email has been blocked by the recipient’s mail server, typically indicating you’ve been marked as spam.
To decrease both bounce rates, start requiring a double opt-in feature when subscribers sign up for emails. One way you can do this is by having them verify their email address and confirm through an automated email that they want to be included in your email subscriber list.
Unsubscribe Rate
Unsubscribe rate is the percentage of subscribers who choose to unsubscribe from receiving your emails. For most campaigns, the average unsubscribe rate is 0.17%, which is relatively low, but can vary wildly depending on the size of your email lists and the frequency of your emails.
To avoid unsubscribes from recipients in your email marketing campaign list, you might want to consider sending fewer emails each week or each month. While this might seem counterproductive to your sales goals, you’re more likely to keep subscribers engaged if you aren’t spamming them with emails on a regular basis. Try to only send emails when you have important announcements or deals to share with your customer base.
Click-Through Rate
Click-through rate (CTR) tracks how many people clicked on the links in your email. With this metric, you should aim for an average CTR of around 2.5%.
If you’re seeing below 1% in CTR, try placing links at the beginning of your email or anywhere above the fold. If subscribers aren’t making it to the end of your emails, giving them the link early could help increase CTR. Additionally, create eye-catching calls-to-action throughout your emails to entice subscribers to click on your links. And be sure to add tracking codes to each link so you can test which CTAs worked and which didn’t.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate tells you the percentage of people who clicked on a link within your email and then completed a specific action. Conversion rates are an important metric for marketers to analyze because it determines your overall return on investment. A good conversation rate for an email campaign is between 2-5%.
A simple way to improve email conversion rates is by selecting one primary action or goal you want subscribers to take and promote it in your email. If there’s too much going on in the email, subscribers can get confused as to what you want them to do, which may ultimately lead them to do nothing. Keep the goals simple and ensure CTAs and email copy are direct in how you want someone to take action.
Overall ROI
Overall return on investment (ROI) measures how profitable your email marketing efforts are by comparing the amount of spend put behind emails to the number of actions (or conversions) taken by subscribers. The average ROI for email marketing campaigns is about $42 for every $1 spent.
While not every email campaign will see returns to that extent, not knowing how much you’ve made off of a campaign can make it seem as though your efforts were a waste. By tracking your ROI, you can see firsthand how your investment is paying off and, over time, reinvest what you’ve made into larger email campaigns to hopefully see better returns.
Need help developing and managing email marketing campaigns? Hurrdat Marketing can help you create engaging emails and monitor their success. Learn more about our email marketing services!
