Email marketing is among the most powerful and affordable digital marketing tools available to businesses today. But launching a campaign without knowing how to track its performance is like buying a car with broken parts. It will not take you far! You need to know which metrics to track to gauge its performance.
- Click to Open Rate
The open rate is among the most telling email campaign engagement metrics. It tells you how many people opened the emails you sent out. For example, if the campaign involved sending 100 emails and only 20 were opened by the recipients, this means you have a 20% click-to-open rate. When it comes to formulating and executing digital marketing strategies, a high open rate means there’s a strong relationship between the campaign and the recipients. In most cases, the sender’s name is the only reason why certain emails get opened. Some of the factors that can affect the click-to-open rate include: • The time of day sent • Frequency of sending • Subject line These three factors help showcase why it’s important for marketers to learn how to measure the performance of an email marketing campaign. Knowing what makes recipients want to open an email allows you to optimize your campaign better. - Click Through Rate
The click-through rate (CTR) refers to the number of recipients who clicked on the links embedded in your emails. Often, the main goal of a campaign is to get the subscribers to open these links. This makes the CTR one of the most significant measures to track. If unsure of how to track the CTR, make it a point to invest in an email checker software. Marketers typically calculate the CTR by taking the number of clicks received and dividing it by the number of emails delivered. For example, the Total Number of Clicks/ Total Number of Emails Sent Common factors that are likely to affect the CTR include: • The anchor text used with the link • Link placement in the email body • Number of times the link appears in the email • Nature of copy leading to the link Consider tracking your CTR on a weekly basis to help you learn what needs changing. - Bounce Rate
The bounce rate refers to the total number of emails that fail to get delivered. Email bounce rate = (number of failed deliveries/number of emails sent out by the campaign) *100 For example, if you have 20 failed email deliveries and 20,000 emails sent, your bounce rate will be 0.1% (20/20,000*100). In email marketing, bounces can occur in two ways: soft and hard bounces. A soft bounce is where there’s a temporary failure to deliver the campaign email. On the other hand, a hard bounce occurs when you send an email to a nonexistent, closed, or invalid address. Although a bounce rate may not affect the performance of your campaign, you still need to keep a close eye on this metric. If you get too many hard bounces, your reputation as a sender will become downgraded. This may make ESPs categorize you as a spammer. - Conversion Rate
Email marketers cannot afford to overlook the conversion rates. This is a metric that helps in tracking the number of recipients who have completed the desired action. Depending on the nature of the campaign, the desired action may include making a purchase or signing up for a webinar. There’s a need to ensure that every email campaign has a well-defined goal. Without a goal, it will become challenging to learn how to analyze email campaign performance like a pro. Your goal, in this case, should be the action you want the recipient to take after reading your mail. - Spam Complaint Rate
As the name suggests, the spam complaint rate refers to the number of recipients who labeled the email as spam. People mark emails as spam for many reasons. Some of this includes sending irrelevant content, emailing too frequently, and not including an unsubscribe link. You may also want to avoid using stale email addresses if you don’t want your email to end up in the spam folder. To calculate the spam complaint rate, you need to take the total number of complaints and divide them by the number of emails sent out.
Conclusion
You need to be vigilant about the key metrics you and your team are using to track the success of your campaign. The five metrics described above are a good starting point and will help you record success with your campaign. Use them to make the necessary modifications as the campaign progresses.
