You’ve read all the blogs on how to get your email campaigns set up and running smoothly, but now what? We’re discussing ten essential metrics you should know as an email marketer, and how you can use each one to improve your current email strategy. Let’s jump in.
1. Open Rate
You’re probably already familiar with this metric, as it’s fundamental to knowing whether you’re sending the right content to your subscribers. Open rates can give valuable insight into what your subscribers respond to best. This metric helps you master key email components, including email subject lines, send times, and sending cadence. According to the 2018 Email Benchmarks Report by GetResponse, the average open rate of email marketing campaigns is 24%. If your open rates are higher, you’re definitely on the right track!
2. Click-through Rate
While open rates give insight into your subscribers’ interest in your emails, click-through rates indicate how successful your campaign is at incentivizing action. Your click-through rate (CTR for short) shows you how many subscribers are clicking the links in your emails, and can help you understand what types of content your subscribers want to see. On average, email campaigns have a CTR of 4%, with welcome emails receiving the highest CTR at 21%.
Tip: Since the CTR for welcome emails is more than 5x the average, take some time to choose CTAs that will have the highest impact!
3. Conversion Rate
While CTR indicates how good your email is at getting subscribers to act, conversion rate shows how many actually completed the action. It's important to look at these metrics in tandem to see where there's room for optimizing - if your CTR is high but your conversion rate is low, look at the barriers in what you're linking out to. For example, your checkout process or the steps to enter a contest may be causing subscribers to drop off while completing the action.
4. Email Sharing Rate
This measures how many of your subscribers share your email on social media, or forward it to their friends. This metric gives you an idea of how many brand advocates you have and typically indicates how shareable your email is. It’s valuable to leverage this sharing because email shareability can help grow your email list by bringing in new subscribers and encouraging current subscribers to become brand advocates.
5. Email Delivery Rate
This rate is often overlooked, but is an important metric to ensure long term email delivery success. The TL;DR of why this is important:if you don’t pay attention to deliverability, your emails could be landing in spam. Maintaining your email list hygiene and staying on top of email deliverability can ensure your emails always land in the inbox.
6. Bounce Rate
Aside from landing in the spam folder, your email can also fail to deliver to your contacts. The bounce rate measures this by telling you how many subscribers didn’t receive your email. There are two types of bounces: (1) soft bounce rate tracks temporary problems with email addresses, like full inboxes, and (2) hard bounce rate tracks permanent problems, like invalid or nonexistent email addresses. Having a high bounce rate may mean your email list is outdated, has many invalid email addresses, or has a lot of mistyped email addresses. One way to avoid high bounce rates is to implement a double opt-in, which gets subscribers to verify their email address after subscribing.
7. Spam Report Rate
This is an important metric to keep an eye on - as it rises, the chances you’ll be marked as a “bad” sender skyrocket. Why does this matter? ISPs (think: Gmail, Outlook) can block you from sending emails to contacts on their domain. To avoid getting marked as spam, make sure you’re only sending campaigns to subscribers who’ve opted-in, use segmentation to send relevant, targeted emails, and include a clear way to unsubscribe on every campaign.
8. Unsubscribe Rate
Another key metric is your unsubscribe rate, which tells you the rate at which contacts are opting out of receiving your emails. It’s like a break up rate. This is vital to understanding what content is not working for your subscribers. If you’re seeing a pattern of high unsubscribe rates after a certain type of email, you might want to rethink the type of content you’re sending.
9. List Growth Rate
A great measure of how your overall email strategy is performing is your list growth rate. This shows how quickly your contact list is increasing over time, aka how many people like your brand and want to hear from you! It’s natural for your list to churn, but it’s important to track overall growth to continually increase your reach.
10. Overall ROI
Who doesn’t love good return on investment? This metric shows you the revenue generated from your email campaigns, and can be calculated by dividing total revenue by total spend. A recent study by Forbes found that email marketing continues to bring in the highest ROI out of all digital marketing channels (and is also the top profit generator), proving the value in having a strong email marketing strategy.
You’re now an email performance pro!
There you have it - the ten essential email marketing metrics you should know. Now that you’re familiar with the ways you can assess email campaigns, you’ll be able to test different strategies to see what works best for your brand. Curious how other brands are performing? Check out GetResponse’s 2018 Email Marketing Benchmarks Report for more insight into how you’re currently measuring up in your industry.