By Chris Donald
Email marketing is the best way to engage your customers and build strong relations with them. All you need is the address of your customers and you can send them tailored email content based on their customer journey and demographics without being bound by time or location. Email marketing is a constant learning experience; if you don’t pause to learn and improve from your previous email campaign, you will not be utilizing email marketing to its full potential. Knowing the different types of email metrics and understanding what each metrics conveys is the best way to analyse your previous email campaigns.
Open Rates
The stepping stone to any email campaign analysis i.e. open rates specifies the number of subscribers who have opened your emails. Since most subscribers tend to open an email based on the subject line, open rates indicate the effectiveness of your subject line. It is measured when a subscriber opens an email and a 1x1px image is downloaded into their device. So, if your subscriber has disabled images, that open might not be registered but despite that, open rate measurements are reliable.
Click Rates
Once the subscriber has opened your email, it is time for the email copy and the call-to-action button to work their magic. If they are persuasive enough, the subscriber will be interested to click the button and be redirected to the relevant landing page. The click rate depends on different elements of your email such as hero image, email copy, relevant images, the offer value and the call-to-action button copy. Additionally, in case of multiple call-to-action buttons, the click rates also show which button performed better.
Bounce Rate
Bounces are undelivered emails. It can be because of low inbox space, issues at user-end or due to incorrect email address. In the former two cases, the email shall be sent again after a specific time duration, but the latter signifies a dead email communication and is harmful in longer run. Ensure a double opt-in to reduce incorrect submissions and check the email address syntax if only handful of bounces exist.
SPAM Complaints and Unsubscribes
Nobody likes to receive emails from brands they never remember signing-up for or no longer wish to be subscribed to. So, for brands who spam emails, there is a provision of registering a complaint against them. This severely reduces the sender reputation and affects any future email campaigns. So, you must take any SPAM complaints seriously and send emails to customers who gave explicit confirmation to be on your mailing list.
Those who no longer wish to be a part of your emailing list can choose to unsubscribe and while this doesn’t affect your sender reputation, you don’t want anyone to unsubscribe out of bad user experience.
Optimal Open Times
For brands with global reach, it is important to send emails at the most opportune moment when your subscribers are likely to open it. It is stated that the peak performance of emails is for 4 hours after the email is sent and by observing when your subscribers open your emails, you can fine-tune your send timings. This means no more searching online for best optimal send timings.
Email Clients Distribution
Every email client renders the same email differently and the rendered email may or may not look the way you designed it. So certain email client specific codes need to be included in your email so that it is rendered perfectly. Coding and testing such emails is a time-consuming process unless you know the list of devices your subscribers use. This metrics is only available in certain email marketing services providers such as Email on Acid, Litmus, HubSpot, Adestra, ActiveCampaign, etc but is worthwhile to measure occasionally.
Revenue Per Email Campaign
This is industry-specific metrics which many email marketers may not be measuring but it is important while measuring the ROI of a campaign. It is an indirect indication of the conversion rate of an email campaign.
Lifetime Value of a Customer
This is an ecommerce and online retailer specific metrics that is measured yearly. It implies the number of orders placed v/s the value of each orders from the emails sent.
Wrapping Up
Wondering on how well your email metrics stack against rest of the industry? While industry benchmarks help you understand the metrics of different industries, yours need not meet it. Consider it as a guideline and constantly measure above email metrics to finally be industry leader one day. Share your views in the comments below if you have already matched or surpassed your industry standards.
Chris Donald is the Director of InboxGroup, A professional email marketing agency that specializes in providing advanced email marketing solutions from production, email audit services to deployment. He has worked directly with Fortune 500 companies, retail giants, non-profits, SMBs and government bodies in all facets of their professional email marketing services and marketing automation programs since almost 2 decades. He enjoys sharing his distinctive thoughts and insights into his email marketing blog.
Marketing stock photo by NicoElNino/Shutterstock
