I have been in email marketing since over a decade, and frequently went through stories about effective email marketing campaigns. People out there talked for hours on topics like 'the most critical components of an email' and 'the mistakes that destroy your email campaigns',and so on. Believe me, that list could be pretty long.
Top Email Marketing Metrics for Campaign Success:
Since a long time, the need of standardization in purchasing and comparing email services has been felt. For email marketers it is very tough task to achieve a consistency in email definitions and matrices for improving and managing their email marketing campaigns.
On the contrary, despite all the optimization done, if an email campaign doesn't achieve its goal, it's utter waste of effort. Before inking the deal, the first question I ask my clients is their objective behind the campaign. Most of the marketers want to boost subscriber base or like to generate leads that eventually get converted into potential customers.
1. Click Through Rate
If going by the definition, Click Through Rate (CTR) is the percentage of email recipients who clicked on the links given in an email. Being the growth-oriented marketer, I put CTR first on the metric list to be measured. It lets marketers track and measure performance for every individual mail sent to the recipients.
CTR plays a decisive role in measuring results of A/B tests. A/B tests are conducted to find different methods to get more clicks in the emails. Click Through Rate is indeed the most important metric that gives you direct insight into the number of audience engaging with your content and interested to know more about you.
2. Conversion Rate
If going with the definition, Conversion Rate is measured by the percentage of email recipients who clicked on a link within an email and completed a desired action. That desired action could be filling out a lead generation form or purchasing a product.
Once your recipient comes to the desired location by clicking through on your email, next goal should be to get them to convert on your offer. Conversion is actually an action that an email asked your audience to take. Conversion is directly linked to the call-to-action in your mail, and a precise call-to-action should be directly linked to the overall goal of your email marketing.
3. Bounce Rate
If going by the definition, Bounce Rate is the percentage of total emails that couldn't successfully delivered to the respective inboxes during email marketing. For marketers, there are two bounces they usually resort to track hard ans soft bounces. Soft bounces occurred when delivery of emails are failed due to temporary problems such as a full inbox or a problem with the recipient’s server. These emails are queued for delivery, and once the problem clears up, mails are delivered.
On the contrary, Hard bounces are occurred when an email is sent to an invalid, closed, or non-existent email address. These emails never reach to the recipient's email address. A marketer should immediately remove hard bounce addresses from email list, because internet service providers (ISPs) use bounce rates to consider an email sender’s reputation. A marketer should run some authentic data validation techniques to ensure a list fully validated and ready to use.
4. List Growth Rate
If going by the definition, List growth is the rate at which your email list is growing. It's important for effective email marketing Besides CTR and Conversion rates, List growth is another segment you should consider wisely. A marketer should be aiming to grow email list in order to extend his reach, expand audience, and position himself as an industry thought leader. It's very important to pay attention to growing your subscriber list and keeping it at a healthy size.
5. Email Campaign Performance Metrics
- Email Conversions
E-mail conversion defines the scenario that judge the total number of registrations, purchases and transactions were taken as the potential result of the email marketing campaign. E mail conversion rates depict actual turnaround of the customer against a particular email marketing campaign.
- Email Revenue
This metric allow answering about the revenue generated against a direct email campaign or multi channel email marketing campaign. This is a monetary amount calculating the entire revenue accumulated.
- Email Gross Profit
Email gross profit is calculated by obtaining the actual revenue generated from the campaign and subtracting it from the accumulated direct cost of deployment, creative development, cost of email list rental etc.
- Email eCPM
Best known as email cost per thousand, this metric elaborates the list rental and explains about the revenue generated per email impression delivered.
The formula for calculating the eCPM is:
---Cost associated with sending the emails revenue generated x 1000 / Number of impressions delivered.
6. Campaign Activity Indicators
- Total Email Opens
This metric record the user activities to confirm that actually recipient has gone through the message and viewed it. The metric sometimes virtually or falsely detect some opens when the message is briefly loaded into the preview pane or recipient actually not viewed the message.
- Unique Email Opens
The only difference between total email opens and unique email opens lies in the nature. In unique email opens, duplicate are redundant mails are deleted. This metric answer about the number of unique recipients viewed the message.
- Click to open rate
It defines the number of individuals who actually took the action among all those who perform unique email opens. There are two ways in which click to open rate is calculated:
7. Campaign Deliverability Indicators
Email Sent asserts about the total number of messages in queue before attempting any message delivery. This metric is generally used to provide the bills for email service provider delivery. It is represented in the form of whole number.
Email Goes indicates the total number of valid email addresses hat accepted the message in a very regular form. In very clear terms it defines that how many messages were delivered to the recipients mail box without pooping up bounce or other mail delivery errors. It is very important to know here that a message counts as delivered if it is accepted and placed in a junk mail folder. Email delivery rate percentage in the form of 90% and the inverse known as the bounce rate.
Email Inbox Delivered is meant to answer the question that how relevant and successful was the email campaign. This estimation is generally generated by taking the metric email delivered and excluding any message from this that is not appeared in the inbox.
8. Overall ROI
If going by the definition, ROI is the overall return on the investment for the email campaign launched. Like every other digital marketing channel, a marketer should have an ability to track and monitor the overall return on a email marketing campaign executed. To measure the ROI, a system should be in place where marketers can assign different values to various types of leads based on their ability to generate revenue.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.
March 11th, 2016 at 11:23 am
The most evident is to make your email messages mobile friendly — i.e. responsive — because there’s no better approach to execute click-through rates than to have half your emails be unclickable and even unreadable.
March 11th, 2016 at 2:19 pm
The top reason people mark emails as spam is because they don’t want the bother of finding the hidden unsubscribe link and then going through the steps some advertisers require to get off the list.