Email metrics provide the insights you need to run successful marketing campaigns. When you can understand the metrics of your latest email marketing campaign, you’ll know the dos and don’ts of communicating with your specific subscribers. For each aspect of the email you want to analyze, you can study an associated metric.
As more sophisticated technologies become available, the ways we track the performance of marketing campaigns have also improved. Modern analytics can divide performance metrics into groups by device, region, and domain (such as Google or Yahoo).
Knowing how you stand, especially compared to your industry’s averages, you can discover powerful insights into a past campaign’s reception while helping you determine where you should focus your efforts in future campaigns.
Source: Campaign Monitor
How do you measure email metrics?
With HTML-enabled email clients and services, you’re able to track every email’s lifecycle during a marketing campaign. The process starts upon delivery of the email to the recipient’s inbox. From there, it checks every following action the user takes on the object and relays that information to the analytics engine.
If the email client routes the email to a spam folder, it will eventually start causing more of your emails to bounce. And, over time, this accumulation of bounces negatively affects your delivery rate, which means lower opens and fewer conversions down the line.
Similarly, if the email reaches the inbox and the recipient opens it, you’ll know from your open rate. Seeing a low mobile open rate may mean your emails aren’t formatting properly on handheld devices. That is valuable information to have during any marketing campaign and will inform how you design and direct future campaigns.
This means that with every campaign you send, you become more knowledgeable and more successful as you refine your strategy.
What are the most important metrics?
For general marketers doing business in specific geographical locations, knowing the open rate could be vital. It allows you to alter your strategy, and, if sales fall behind for that period’s targets, you can intervene by offering specials or discounts to your subscribers quickly.
You can also test different types of lifecycle marketing approaches. Email metrics will allow you to check your click-through rates and conversion success for different marketing segments. You can then adopt the most successful approaches regularly.
A click-through takes place when a recipient clicks on a link in the email, while a conversion rate is how many times someone followed through the ultimate goal of your campaign, whether it’s making a purchase or downloading a resource or something else entirely.
The bounce rates will tell you how many of your intended recipients actually received the email. Emails that aren’t received are divided into soft and hard bounces. Hard bounces show permanent delivery problems, while soft bounces are temporary and probably domain related. The higher your bounce rate, the lower your sending reputation and deliverability rating becomes.
Reaching a certain low rating may cause an internet or email service provider to blacklist your address, hurting your chances of running a successful marketing campaign. It’s crucial to manage your list and remove any hard bounces to maintain a good deliverability rate.
Does it really matter?
With more and more algorithms managing—and often limiting—how your marketing materials are viewed online, knowing how your email marketing campaign performs is vital.
About 85% of all daily emails are spam.
If ESPs add you to blacklists because of spam reports or bounce rates, studying the metrics will probably tell you why. You can still course-correct and start improving on your ratings by knowing where to focus.
What now?
If you aren’t tracking your campaigns in real time, you could miss the next opportunity to increase your marketing ROI. With interactive content and responsive templates, building a campaign and tracking the exact areas of performance could potentially make all the difference to your bottom line.
Now that you know what email metrics are and why they’re important, build your next email marketing campaign by signing up with an ESP like Campaign Monitor.