10 Metrics To Track for Successful Email Marketing
If you want to know how to design the best email marketing message, turn to your email metrics. The analytics from your email platform will tell you the story of your audience. Whether your recipients are engaged and clicking through to your website or sending your message to the dreaded digital trash box without opening, the numbers are a good projection of what's happening after you hit "send".
Is your Email Marketing Campaign successful?
What's your benchmark for a successful email campaign? An uptick in product sales, 10 new email contacts, or perhaps several views of a new how-to video. In order to determine if your message is performing well, you need to identify a specific conversion.
Some of the most common email marketing conversions include customer contact collection, product purchase, or brand referral, but every business is unique, so create a measurable conversion for your company then keep a close eye on the numbers.
10 Metrics to Monitor
- Open rate: The percentage of emails opened. The open rate is a top statistic to monitor if you're planning to perform A/B testing or comparing your weekly emails.
- Bounce rate: The percentage of emails sent that were not delivered to the recipient's inbox. The "bounce" may be caused by an invalid email address, address that's no longer active, or a technical problem, like a full inbox or the recipient's server is down.
- Device type: The percentage of users who opened your email from specific devices, like a mobile device or computer. An HTML responsive email template is best to reach your mobile users.
- Click-thru rate: The percentage of recipients who clicked on the email to get to your website. This metric is helpful in guiding your content creation. Pay close attention to the emails with a high click-thru rate to help guide your copy and image development.
- Conversion rate: The percentage of customers who took the desired call-to-action in the email. Did you direct recipients to download an ebook or sign up for a podcast? This statistic tells you if they completed the CTA.
- Email list growth rate: The rate at which you are growing your contacts. To calculate your email list growth rate, take the number of new subscribers and deduct the cumulative total of your unsubscribes and spam reports. Divide that figure by the total number of email addresses on your list and multiply by 100. Example: (100 new subscribers - 10 unsubscribes and email/spam complaints) ÷ 3,000 email addresses on the list * 100 = 3% list growth rate
- Email engagement rate: The time an average recipient spends on your marketing email.
- Share / forward rate: The percentage of recipients who click on a "share" button within the email to post to social media, or the number of recipients who clicked on a button within the email to "forward to a friend".
- Return on investment (ROI): The amount of money you bring in from email marketing campaigns. The figure will be your total revenue divided by total spend.
- Unsubscribe rate: The percentage of email recipients who opt out of your emails after opening one. Pay attention to the subject line and content within emails that produce a high unsubscribe rate. The number of opt outs implies your audience does not want to see this type of content.
Average Email Metrics
Email marketing metrics vary by industry. Across all industries, the average open rate of marketing emails is 21.33%. The average click-thru rate across all industries is 2.62%, and the average unsubscribe rate is 0.26%.
Compare your email metrics to these averages to begin to determine how your messages fair against other business emails. Take a video tour of the Admail platform and allow us to help you develop and track successful email marketing campaigns.