Before sending your next campaign you should stop and ask yourself: What is the goal of my email marketing? Is it to generate more leads? To convert more leads into customers? Increase sales? Whatever you decide your goal is, the next thing you need to do is figure out which metrics you’ll need to track in order to determine how you’re progressing toward that goal.
Here are some of the most important email marketing metrics…
Open Rate
Your open rate simply tells you the number of times your email has been opened. An open is recorded when images are enabled or a link within the email is clicked. Images may be automatically enabled when an email is opened, especially if the recipient has chosen to display them for all emails from that sender. Since recipients may open the email but fail to enable images, this metric can be somewhat inaccurate. However, some of the things you can learn from email open rates are:
• Which subject lines make subscribers want to open your email
• Which days your emails are opened on the most
• What percentage of your database is responsive to your campaigns
Click Rate
Your click rate is extremely important as it tells you of those who opened your email, how many actually interacted with it by clicking on links to visit your website or view more about your products. Email service providers calculate click-through rates by taking the total number of unique individuals who click a link in your email and dividing by the total number of tracked opens.
Conversion Rate
After an email recipient has clicked through on your email, the next goal is typically to get them to convert on your offer — in other words, to take the action that your email has asked them to take. So if you’re sending an email to offer your audience the chance to download a free whitepaper, you’d consider anyone who actually downloads that whitepaper to be a conversion.
Google Analytics is one means of tracking these conversions and can be integrated with most email service providers including NewZapp.
Action Rate Over Time
Curious what time your subscribers are most interested in taking action with your emails? By using the Graph tab in
NewZapp Track
you can view the amount of opens by time and date up until the present time. This will allow you to look for any spikes in opens or clicks and see when majority of these occur over the last hour, day or week. You can also use the slider to manually narrow down the time frame to your own requirements and run a comparison between the selected and other campaigns.
If you notice a trend such as an increased amount of action between a specific time periods, try sending an email at that time for your next campaign. You might find that you will boost your click through rate even more by simply catering to your audience’s favourite time to read emails.
Unsubscribe Rate
A common misconception will lead you to believe that
unsubscribes
can only be a bad thing, but people unsubscribe for a reason, so don’t be downhearted when someone does; just take it as feedback for the next campaign you send. If you notice a spike in unsubscribes from a particular email, you’ll need to analyse exactly what your subscribers didn’t like and avoid it in future campaigns.
Bounce Rate
Bounces are the number of emails you sent out that were returned by the recipient’s server and therefore undelivered. Bounced emails are unavoidable in email marketing, what matters most is how you deal with them.
To keep your subscriber list up to date and to get the best results from your email campaigns, we recommend you clean the bounced emails from your database following each campaign you send. If you have a NewZapp account these will be handled automatically for you.
How you manage bounces will depend on the type you have. Like boiled eggs, there are two types of email bounce – hard and soft. A hard bounce will indicate a permanent issue with the recipients email address, for example when the email address doesn’t exist any more, or it’s been misspelled and therefore doesn’t exist. A soft bounce can indicate a temporary or resolvable issue with the email address, for example when the recipient’s mailbox is full.
Gracie Stewart is Email Marketing Excutive at NewZapp Email Marketing.
