Email marketing is one of the most powerful digital marketing techniques to connect with people. In today’s highly competitive digital marketplace, when every business is scrambling for attention and trying to connect with customers, the role of emails to achieve your marketing goals is crucial.
Apart from keeping your target audience informed, email reaches customers in real time and allows you to connect with them personally. It’s for reasons like these that, when compared with other marketing means, email marketing has the highest conversion rates at around 66%.
Though it is one of the most effective digital marketing techniques to engage your target audience and generate leads, not every email marketing campaign reaches its ultimate marketing goals. To attain your goals, grow your subscriber list, and generate more leads, you need to keep track of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to know whether you are progressing towards your goals. Here are a few KPIs that you must use to track your email marketing campaigns.
Click-Through Rate
Click-through rate is defined as the percentage of email recipients who have clicked on the links in any given email. Digital marketers consider it an important indicator, as it gives you insight into how many people are engaging with your email content and showing interest in your brand. It directly helps you to learn about the performance of each and every email you are sending to your target audience. The click-through rate, or CTR, the calculation is very simple. For example, if you have sent an email to 1000 people and out of that, 100 people have clicked the incorporated link, the CTR will be “100 clicks/1000 emails X 100” = 10% click-through rate.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is another important metric to measure the performance of an email marketing campaign. It is defined as the percentage of recipients who have not only clicked on the link within an email but also completed the desired action like subscribing to a newsletter or purchasing a featured product. Having a user click a link is not useful if the email fails to convert recipients into buyers. Therefore, conversion rates are an effective metric to determine if email campaigns are driving revenue and converting leads into customers.
Bounce Rate
Not every email you are sending gets delivered to your targeted recipients. The percentage of emails that don’t get delivered is called the bounce rate. For example, if 8 emails out of 1000 emails did not get delivered, the bounce rate of your campaign is 8/1000 X 100 = 0.8%. Though bounce rates don’t determine the efficiency of your campaign, it helps you to understand how many recipients are receiving your emails. Remember, bounces are of two kinds: soft bounces and hard bounces. Soft bounces are temporary issues that arise due to problems in the recipient’s server. However, hard bounces must be removed from your email list as they are the result of invalid or closed email addresses and continuing to send to them can damage your sending reputation.
Unsubscribe Rate
The unsubscribe rate of your emails indicates the percentage of recipients who click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of each email. Recipients do this to no longer receive your email content, usually if they’re no longer interested in your offerings or feel you email them too often. If you see a sudden increase in unsubscribe rates it is important to investigate what might have caused the spike and adjust your future email campaigns accordingly.
Open Rate
Open rate is the percentage of recipients who have opened an email. Most email marketers rely on this metric to compare the open rates of all their email campaigns and improve their email strategy accordingly. Open rates are a great metric to track when you’re A/B testing subject lines to determine what audiences are finding the most appealing.
Overall Return on Investment
The ultimate goal of every marketing campaign is revenue generation. It is therefore important that you measure the profit you are generating from each email marketing campaign. The overall return on investment (ROI) is your revenue divided by the total spend on your email campaign and can help you determine exactly how much money your email campaigns are generating compared to other digital marketing tactics.
Monitoring Your Email Campaign Success Using KPIs
Monitoring your email marketing campaigns can help you identify areas for improvement, refine your email content, and generate more revenue from your email campaigns. The metrics discussed above are a great place to get started whether you’re just beginning to market your business using email or have been doing it for years.
