Email marketing is a key part of any business’s digital strategy. It’s an effective way to reach your customers and prospects, while also giving you the ability to nurture those relationships over time. But how do you know if your email marketing efforts are working? That’s where metrics come in!
As an email marketing agency, who has worked alongside Manchester City Football Club, Swinton Insurance, Dulux and Eurostar, and delivered 1000s of results reports, we thought we were very well placed to deliver this guide. We will explain what each metric means for your business, offer tips for understanding them better and show you how to use these insights to improve your campaigns.
Delivery rate
The delivery rate is the percentage of emails that were successfully delivered.
This is a very important metric and your email programme should be working to 97% and above. If you’re below 97% then we would suggest that you need to cleanse your data as a matter of urgency, as you’re in danger of damaging your sender reputation.
Open rate
The open rate is the percentage of people who opened your email. It’s a good indicator of how much attention your content is getting and it also shows you how well your subject line resonates with readers, but it’s not all that matters.
If you have a low open rate, focus on testing different subject lines to see which one gets more opens. Take a look at our white paper, “Copywriting for email”, where we outlined 9 kickstart strategies to maximise the performance of your subject lines.
You might also want to test the frequency at which you send emails and revisit whether or not you should be sending daily or weekly updates instead of monthly ones.
Read our blog “What is the best time to send your email marketing“.
Click-through rate (from delivered)
Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who click on a link in an email. For example, if 100 emails are sent and 10 people click the link in those emails, then that would mean you have a 10% CTR.
Click-through rate (from open)
Click-through rate (from open) is the percentage of people who click from an email through to the website. For example, if 100 emails are sent, 50 people open the email and and 10 people click the link in those emails, then that would mean you have a 20% CTR (from open).
As an email marketing agency, who are often responsible for design, copy and content, this is a particularly important metric as it’s be the best indicator as to whether your content is interesting and effective.
Generally speaking, a high CTR means your content is interesting and effective—people are clicking through because they want more information about what you’re offering! If your CTR is low or consistently decreasing over time, it could be an indication that something needs to change; perhaps you need to add more urgency to your message or provide more value for free if readers aren’t taking advantage of the offer inside the email.
Read our blog article entitled “How to boost your email marketing click through rates”.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of emails that are returned to the sender because they couldn’t be delivered.
It’s an important metric because it tends to indicate whether you’re adhering to best practice or not. For example, if you’re seeing high number of emails are being returned, it means that your data is not of the quality is needs to be and your risking your sender reputation.
Unsubscribe rate
The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of people who unsubscribed from your emails, divided by the total number of people who received your emails. The lower this number, the better! This metric measures how well you are engaging with your subscribers. A higher unsubscribe rate means that you may be sending too many promotional messages and/or not giving readers enough value in return.
Read our blog article entitled “How to keep your email marketing unsubscribe rate low”.
Average time spent on site & Average number of pages viewed
It’s important to understand what quality of traffic you’re sending through to the website and Average time spent on site and average number of pages viewed are both excellent metrics.
- Average time spent on site is how long a web visitor has spent on the site being leaving.
- Average number of pages viewed is how many different web pages a web visitor might have viewed before leaving the site.
It’s often interesting to see how email marketing might compare to social traffic, direct traffic or organic traffic.
Conclusion
We hope this guide has helped you learn more about the key email marketing metrics and how they can help you improve your email campaigns. Remember, these metrics will evolve over time as technology advances and new types of emails appear on the market. With that in mind, it’s important to keep up with changes in the industry so that you stay relevant!
comments