6 Email Marketing Metrics You Need to Watch (And Why)

When you are working on your email marketing campaigns, you can’t just hope that they are going well and giving you a good ROI. You need to track some very important KPIs (key performance indicators) to ensure that your campaign is effective. If you notice that any of these factors are suffering, there are things that you can do to make sure that you improve, but if you aren’t tracking your results, you aren’t going to be able to improve.

The following 6 email marketing metrics are important for you to watch and track to ensure that you get the best results out of your email marketing campaign.

1. Spam Complaint Rate

The spam complaint rate is the number of people who received an email from you and click on their report spam option then divided by the total number of contacts who received the campaign.

You may not pay attention to your spam complaint rate because it is low enough to be acceptable by your email service provider, but you should still pay attention to this number.

If you noticed that your spam complaint rate is higher than you want it to be, there could be a few reasons why this is happening. We really hope that you didn’t buy an email list, but if you did, this is almost certainly your problem. If your recipients don’t recognize your sender address, this can also be an issue so make sure you put a sender address that they will recognize.

Sending email with low quality content is another way to get flagged as spam as well as hiding your unsubscribe button. You would rather someone unsubscribe than spend you to spam. If too many people give you a spam complaint, you could be banned from your ESP (email service provider).

While there could be other reasons that you are having these spam complaint problems, these are probably the most likely.

Make sure that you send out an email periodically to see if your old email subscribers still want to be subscribed. If they do not click the link to stay subscribed, go ahead and delete them. This will lower your possibility of spam complaints.

2. Open Rate

As the name implies, open rate is the percentage of people that open a given email that you send.

While open rates are not 100% accurate, they are usually pretty close and can give you an idea of how many people open your emails.

What you can tell from your open rate is how interested people are in your emails. This could be a reflection on your overall campaign or only a reflection on the topic or subject line.

There are different industry averages for open rates but if your open rate is 20% of higher, you shouldn’t be too worried. Of course, you can always work on improving your subject line copy in order to get better results.

If you are emailing your subscribers too much, you may find that you have a lower open rate as well. Only email your subscribers when you have something valuable to send them and you may notice that your open rates rise.

3. Click Through Rate (CTR)

Your CTR or click through rate is how many people click through to a link in your email once they open it. If your subject line matches what you are talking about in your body content and you have a link to a valuable resource, you are likely to find that you will have a higher CTR.

If your subject was misleading and your link in your email is not related, you are likely to have a very low CTR. Make sure to write relevant and compelling email campaigns in order to get the best CTR possible.

Another thing that you should note is that people need more than one opportunity to click your links. You should give them a couple of times at minimum to click on the same link. They might want to view the entire piece of information early on or they may not want to view your link until the bottom of the email. You need to give them options.

4. Conversion Rate

Every email that you send needs to have a goal. You might be trying to get them to buy a product, download a freemium or some other action. Whatever it is, you need to make sure that you track your conversion rate to see how well your marketing efforts are working. If you are seeing a low conversion rate, you need to see where you can improve.

You should know if you have a goal like a sale, your conversion rate is likely to be lower than if you have a low standard goal like getting someone to download something for free. Make sure you take that into consideration as you are testing.

5. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the number of emails that come back because someone could not receive them. A hard bounce means that the email does not exist or that it no longer exists. A soft bounce means there is a temporary problem.

Neither of these has anything to do with the quality of your emails but instead it has to do with the quality of the list. Make sure to delete email addresses that are hard bouncing and if they soft bounce for too long, delete those as well.

6. Unsubscribe Rate

Your unsubscribe rate is what percentage of people unsubscribe from your email list whenever you send an email. When you are using email marketing services, you should be able to learn to craft emails that will set you up for success and for low unsubscribe rates. Many ESPs provide you with training on how to best market to your list.

You must make sure to keep your emails relevant and offer high value to your subscribers to get the best results.

Conclusion

Knowing what marketing metrics to follow, and knowing how to interpret that data is a huge part of any successful email marketing campaign. Keep these in mind and apply them to your strategy. It may just give you the edge that you need to boost your conversions, as well as your sales.

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