A while ago I wrote a post about email marketing and how powerful it can be for you company. While this is true you should also keep an eye on how successful you campaign is, as I mentioned at the end you should test. As with anything you should try a few different options to see which works the best, and in the this case what works best would be the one that drives the most visitors back to your site to buy your products or services.
In this post I am going to cover what key metrics you should be looking at when deciding how successful an email marketing campaign was for your business. If you don’t keep track you may end up wasting your precocious marketing budget. Let’s dive right in and get started by looking at which metrics you should be looking at and a brief explanation of each of them.
- Deliver-ability: This metric gives you the measure of how many emails were successfully sent to recipients. You may be thinking well shouldn’t this number be 100%, while this seems like a reasonable number it’s quite the opposite as it’s practically impossible to get every email delivered. There are many issues that result in this problem, anything ranging from the quality of your mailing list to ISP rejections, the recipient’s inbox is full, and this list could go on and on.If you choose to use a reputable email marketing service you should experience email deliver-ability rates of 95%+, with the future email campaigns doing successively better all the way up to the 99 percentile. However you probably won’t be experiencing any campaigns reaching 100% deliver-ability. If you are not getting numbers any where near this you may want to start asking some questions of your email marketing service, and see if you can sort out why you are not reaching a good number of the addresses.
Alright now let’s move onto categorizing why your message wasn’t delivered. It can normally be put into one of the two categories; a hard bounce or soft bounce.
Hard bounce: This is when a message has been returned as permanently undeliverable. This could be caused by a number of issues, from non-existent address, changed address, typo, etc.
Soft bounce: This type gets all the way to the recipients server but for some reason cannot be delivered. Some of the reasons the email may not be deliverable may be that the inbox was full, the server was experiencing downtime or was overloaded with other messages, the message was to large, etc. In most cases the service should try to keep delivering the message for a few days but if it remains undeliverable it will be counted as a hard bounce.
To measure deliverability:
((Number of Email Addresses Sent – Number of Email Addresses Bounced) /Number of Email Addresses Sent) * 100% - Detailed domain report: You should be getting a detailed report about your email campaign rather then consolidated report of emails delivered across all of the domains, as this simply isn’t enough information to give you any good insights. A detailed report should include metrics such as how many emails were successfully sent to each of the domains or ISPs (aol, gmail, msn, rediff, yahoo, etc.), how many were rejected, how many were blocked, and how many spam complaints there were, etc. Getting these numbers usually requires your email marketing software or provider to work with the ISPs. If they don’t have any contact with the ISPs you may consider looking for a new email service solution, as this is the basis for a number of actions you could make with your campaign. If you are a reltively new or small company getting complaints of your ISP could serverly hurt your reputation, and cause more damage then anything else, so you will want to make sure that your email marketing solution can provide this type of information.
- Opening rate: This metric gives you the number of recipients who opened the email message.
You will want to find out what metric your email marketing service provider gives you, whether it’s the total number of emails opened or the unique number of openings, or possibly both. While both numbers are important, you should be more concerned with the total number of unique openings rather than the total number of openings.
The standard email opening rate is between 8 to 10%. If your results are better than this number you are doing great, with your list. However if you are getting a number that is sub-par to this you should be seeking answers from your email marketing provider.
Open rate metric = (Number of Emails Opened / (Number of Emails Sent – Number of Emails Bounced)) * 100% - Click Through Rate (CTR): This metric is the measure of actions taken by recipients seeking more information by clicking through from the links embedded in the email message sent. This will help you to gauge the interest of the recipient. Although they have clicked through it may not always end in a sale.Your email marketing software or provider should give you the measure of both total number of link clicks (for all links, by each link) in the message and unique number of clicks for each link. You should be considering the total number of unique clicks more than the total clicks because a recipient may be clicking on the same link twice or more times, and this often times shouldn’t be counted as an marketing insight.
The industry standard for click through rates are between 2 to 3%, If your results are better than this number you are doing great, with your list. However if you are getting a number that is sub-par to this you should be seeking answers from your email marketing provider.
CTR = (Number of unique Emails clicked / (Number of Emails Sent – Number of Emails Bounced)) * 100% - Unsubscribe Rate: This is the measure of the number of unique email addresses that do not want to receive any further emails from you, meaning that they didn’t have any interest in your message resulting in them unsubscribing. This is metric is key in recognizing whether or not the content including in your email was any good. You should also look into when people unsubscribe from your newsletter, whether it’s right after receiving the first one, or if they receive a few and then decide that the included information is not for them.
Your email marketing provider should provide you the details of unsubscribing recipients. You should be able to react quickly to recipients unsubscribing, and it should be an automated process if not, you are dealing with lot of manual effort in unsubscription and may be not effectively taking actions on unsubscriptions. If you are not able to quickly take action on unsubscriptions, your next email marketing campaign could be marked as SPAM by the recipient and then of course complainants will be filed with the ISPs, which will hurt your reputation of being a good marketer.
Unsubscribe Rate = (Number of Email Addresses who unsubscribed / (Number of Email Addresses Sent – Number of Email Addresses Bounced)) * 100% - Viral Rate: When designing the content for your email marketing campaign you should make sure to include some viral content. This will provide you a means of being able to reach more people from forwarding of your message. It’s also important that your email marketing service be able to track this, as well as information such as the email addresses so you can look into this farther later.
Viral Rate = (Number of Emails forwarded / (Number of Emails Sent – Number of Emails Bounced)) * 100% - Conversions: This is the measure of unique email addresses that preformed an action because of your email, this could be something like registering or purchasing if you run a eCommerce site. Depending on what type of business you run you may end up measuring the conversion rate differently, but it all basically translates into how successful your call to action was. By watching this metric you should be able to hone in on which call to action works best in your emails.
This metric of course depends on the earlier metrics, if you had a highly targeted mailing list and your deliver-ability metric was great then the chances of this metric being good increases greatly.
Conversion Rate = (Number of unique Emails resulting in a Conversion / (Number of Emails Sent – Number of Emails Bounced)) * 100% - Visual Reporting: If your email marketing service can provide you with this type of visualization of which links were actually clicked you will be able to better understand your readers and know where they are looking. When you know this type of information you will be able to fine tune the content of you email to suit your visitors and increase the number of clicks you receive from your campaigns.
- Time Distribution: This is also a combination of all the other metrics, plus some more testing. By changing the time of day you send the message out you may generate more of a response, and by sending your newsletters at different hours and tracking what kind of response you received you will be able to fine tune your campaigns for best response from your recipients.
This type of marketing is all about relevance and timing. You will have to find the optimal time for your particular needs, but it’s important for you to think about things like what day of the week it is, what time of the day, and how time your recipient’s will have to spend reading personal emails. Timing may also effect how the spam filters treat the email, making the difference between making the inbox and the spam folder. A good email marketer should be able to time the email sending just right to ensure that as many people as possible will read and respond to the message.
I hope that this list of key metric will help you to better understand how to track the success of your email marketing campaign. By carefully tracking these metrics, testing different content, and testing different sending times you should be able to achieve very high success rates with your email marketing campaigns.
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