Let’s just say it: email marketing is not quite as easy as it used to be. “Was it ever easy?” you may ask. Well, it was certainly easier, given that in 2019 the number of online competitors per retailer has skyrocketed to an all-time high. More than ever before, email marketing has to be eye-catching, it has to be different, and it has to offer something exciting. Most importantly, it has to fall in front of the right pair of eyes. You can have the most well-executed ad, newsletter, or offer in the world, but if it does not fall to the right people, you are wasting your time in sending it. By tracking email marketing metrics, you can effectively work toward the ultimate goals of your company, and set it on the right track to success.
So, how do you create successful campaigns based on emails? What about social media and other forms of digital marketing? Have you thought about engagement and how the audience will view the email? What about the email analytics, the conversion rate, the key metrics, or even the actual email address itself? Have you considered Google analytics or marketing campaigns through email marketers to help increase the number of recipients and the overall rate? It all may seem a little confusing at the start, but it can be done.
First of all, as part of your overall marketing strategy, you need to establish what you’re looking for. Before you start any campaign, you have to decide what your main marketing goal is that you’re hoping to achieve when it comes to sending out emails. Is it to gain subscribers or just up the number of recipients? Do you consider your email successful if a potential customer clicks on your ad, but does not necessarily subscribe to your website or business? Once you’ve established what your goals are, you’ll be able to have a better understanding of what your definition of success is, and which email marketing metrics are most important to you. Let’s have a look at four of the top emailing marketing metrics that you should be tracking, starting from the very beginning.
1. Spam Complaints
This may not be the very first thing you think of when tracking your email marketing metrics, but it definitely should be! You want to make sure that your potential customers are even getting your email in the first place. There’s a chance it may be being sent directly to their spam folder, with little to no hope of them ever actually seeing it. This means that all of your hard work and creative genius may very well have been for nothing. There may be something in your subject line that is triggering the email to be sent directly to spam, or even worse, make the customer themselves be flagging it as spam before even opening it. There also may be something technically wrong with the email. Therefore, before tracking anything further about your email marketing success, make sure you’re getting accurate information first, and that your emails are not being opened just because they are being sent to spam.
2. Open Rate
Regardless of what your ultimate email marketing goal is, how many people are actually opening your emails is going to be one of the very first things you should be looking at, and that you should be tracking. If your email is not being opened, nothing further is going to happen from there. There is no awareness of your product, service, or store, no subscribers, and no business. In order to calculate your open rate, you take the number of emails that you know have been opened, divide this number by the number of emails that you’ve sent overall, and multiply it by 100. For example, you know that out of 2000 emails that you’ve sent, 375 have been opened. Using this formula, you know that your open rate is 18.75%. If your open rate is less than what you feel it should be or has the potential of being, you need to take a look at what you could do differently. More often than not, you need to rethink what you are putting in your subject line. This is the first and really one of the only things that people see when your email pops into their inbox. What can you say differently in order to grab your potential customer’s attention? Are you including their name in the subject line? How can you make it more personal to them?
3. Click-Through Rate
Now that we’ve established that your email has in fact been opened (woohoo!), we need to see if your potential customers are just clicking in and out of the email, or if they’re actually opening the links inside. This means that they have read through your email long enough for something to interest them, and they have gone one step further by clicking on the link(s) that you have included in your email. This may seem like such a small victory, but it is certainly not. The number of competitors that any online retailer, or really any company offering a service has in 2019 is at an all-time high and, unfortunately, our attention spans are at an all-time low. It is becoming increasingly harder to get someone’s attention long enough for them to recognize that you have sent them this email, be interested enough to click on it, and be so intrigued by what they see in the email, that they click on your link. If you have achieved this, you’ve passed through the biggest hurdle!
4. Overall Return on Investment (ROI)
So, you have now passed the first three hurdles, and you have started generating revenue as a result of your email marketing genius. Great! Now, you need to see if your email marketing is actually making you money, or if you are just losing it (money, that is). Email marketing can be expensive, so you are going to want to make sure that you are, in fact, profiting from your email marketing campaign. You are going to be looking at the revenue you have made directly as a result of your email campaign. You are going to subtract the amount you spent to actually execute this campaign, which is your cost of investment. Then, you are going to divide the resulting number by your cost of investment again. So, to calculate your ROI, it’s going to look something like this: profit from investment—the cost of investment/cost of investment.
Final Thoughts
Of course, these are only a few of the email marketing metrics that you should be tracking, but they are certainly some of the most critical to improve the percentage rates and make your marketing efforts worthwhile. If you are going to consider sending out email marketing campaigns, it is incredibly important that you either find a website that is willing to tracking email metrics for you or that you learn how to do this on your own. By working hard at first and setting new email marketing benchmarks, you can increase the number of subscribers from your mailing list and increase the overall delivery rate. After all, the last thing you want is for your creative marketing genius to be for nothing!