The big advantage of any online marketing is having the ability to report and track your efforts. Email is no different.
The main aim of of email marketing is optimising your emails to get the best return on investment (ROI).
In order to do this you must be measuring every single email.
Before we can work out what metrics to measure, we need to work out what our goal is.
Is it for recipients to purchase from your website, call to engage in your services or maybe recommend your products to friends? Whatever it is, it needs to be clearly identified from the beginning.
Here are a few metrics to get you started:
Click Through Rate (CTR)
This refers to the rate in which your recipients clicked one or more links in your email. To calculate your click through rate, use the following formula “Total clicks divided by the number of delivered emails, and multiplied by 100”.
This is the most common metric and is really important for everyone to be tracking, as it gives you direct insight into how many people have engaged with your content.
It also highlights the customers who are most interested in what you are sending.
What is a good click through rate?
Well, that will vary from industry to industry. My recommendation is to monitor what you’re doing and ensure every email improves on the last.
Conversion Rates
This is the percentage of users that clicked a link and took action. This could include making a purchase, filling out a form or referring a friend.
To calculate conversion rates, use the formula “Number of people who completed action, divided by the total number of emails delivered, and multiplied by 100”.
TIP: In order to properly measure conversion rates, ensure your email campaigns are setup to track in Google Analytics as a campaign. This is usually setup within your email provider system, or you can use the free Google Campaign URL Builder.
List Rate
This is the rate at which your email list is growing or declining. For this number, you just need to identify how many subscribers you added or lost each month.
Overall ROI
If you’re a Marketing Manager, the likelihood is your boss is going to want to know what the return on investment (ROI) is on emails.
To calculate this, simply take the dollar value attributed to sales from the email, minus the money invested on the campaign, and then divided again by the money invested on the campaign.
Open Rate
I want to make a point that you shouldn’t pay too much attention to the open rate. Firstly, the open rate is the percentage of email recipients who opened your email.
To optimise a better open rate you may focus on better subject lines. While this can have a great impact, it really shouldn’t be your focus. Focusing on your click-through rate is what will result in better return on investment.
The other reason open rate is a bit misleading is because nowadays email browsers have image blockers built-in and can sometimes distort the metric.
Conclusion
Overall, these metrics are going to help you better optimise your campaigns and improve with every email that goes out.
Be smart about what metrics you are going to track and focus on moving forward. Make sure you are consistently tracking each campaign and using these metrics to improve your campaigns.
