Email marketing is one of the most trending marketing strategies for today’s technologically improved society. If you are launching your new email marketing campaign, you need to know how to measure your Email marketing KPI’s.
KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is nothing but a numerical marketing metric that measures your progress in your goal in digital marketing.
The first thing you have to keep in mind is that marketing is only sometimes about sales. You may have other goals through your campaign, like- re-engagement, education, or collecting additional data for the subscriber. Moreover, you need to continuously analyze your data through such metrics to get a better result. Many marketers usually track 4-5 KPIs for their metrics. However, in email marketing, you need to follow almost 10 KPIs to get an accurate idea.
10 Most Important Email Marketing KPIs
Tracking and analyzing the potentiality of your email marketing campaign is most important to create a stronger database for your company. Refrain from assumptions in marketing, especially when it is digital.
1. Marketing Email Delivery Rate
Consider that you have yet to send an invitation to your friend for your marriage anniversary. However, you are expecting your friend to participate in the ceremony. It’s so silly, right? The same thing happens with your mailbox. You may have 100 or 200 names on your email list, but unfortunately, it doesn’t mean that your mail reaches all of them. There are various reasons behind it.
Firstly, the existence of email IDs is important. For instance, if 75% of your subscribers get your email in their inboxes, it means 25% of email IDs might not exist. If you have 1000 names on your email list, 250 of them will never get your emails.
Secondly, sometimes it’s not up to you. Deliverability can suddenly dip owing to some technical issues. ISP can suddenly blacklist a marketer. That can also be you if you have a shared or dedicated IP. Thirdly, your email delivery can be very good and successful for your recipients but your emails might go straight to the junk folder of your client. You may try Inbox Placement Rate (IPR) as a KPI tool to measure the number of emails that reach your subscriber’s inbox.
If you are facing problems regarding the sending process of email in the system, you need to fix the problem immediately. Otherwise, it may cause severe troubles in your digital email campaigns.
2. Marketing Email Open Rate
Usually, we don’t have enough time to read emails coming to our smartphones, desktops, or laptops. The pop-up ring may make us attentive toward the device. However, we are most eager about social media or personal messenger chats as it mostly comes from our known ones. Most people might have an idea of the senders’ names of emails but hardly open them.
That’s why it’s essential to note the number of emails opened by the recipients of your marketing campaign. After all, who doesn’t want to get attention after a huge amount of hard work? One more thing you have to keep in mind, if the rate of delivered email and IPR do not match, it means that subscribers aren’t paying attention to your emails. For instance, 95% of your emails are delivered, and the IPR rate shows the line within 75%, it means that your emails have successfully reached their destination, but none have opened it. It’s not a good sign at all for your marketing campaign.
The best way to eliminate this trouble is to compare your open rates to the benchmark your company. You have to take some specific industries to compare. For instance, industries regarding job consultancy and hospitality see higher open rates. It makes sense that people often open emails from such industrial senders. Moreover, you can also personalize your subject lines using your user database. It may help you to measure subject line effectiveness.
3. Click Through Rate (CTR)
Often you pass the steps of ‘opens’ and ‘deliverability’ in your marketing campaign. However, it is important to do deeper research with your CTR. For each campaign, you need to be aware of it to know the strength of content, messaging, or offers.
What is CTR? Sometimes the recipients not only open your email but also click and open some links provided within your email. The total number of times recipients click on it, and the total number of emails sent to them are measurable. You may combine this with web conversion. Therefore, it indicates the alignment of your emails and web messaging. Moreover, it indicates the consistency and relevance of your campaign toward the subscriber.
This KPI is very important for you as it indicates the friction if you are conducting your sales process. For instance, if you have a very high CTR but a low conversion rate, it indicates that your emails are doing great. However, there may be some issues with websites that, unfortunately, get your conversion down.
Tracking is important in your email marketing. You should track images throughout your campaign. The unsubscribe link may count as a click, but you have to track that also for the betterment of your marketing.
4. Click-to-open Rate (CTOR)
It is one of the most useful KPIs among email marketers. They often use this key element to measure the number of clicks divided by the number of opens. Most of them prefer CTOR over CTR, as CTOR can measure the success of specific emails more accurately. Deliverability and open rates may affect CTR. However, CTOR indicates how many people open your email. CTOR usually measures how many subscribers clicked on your link. This KPI also tells you how efficiently your subject line and content work is going together. It shows that if your subject line generates a lot of opens having few clicks, there is a major connection problem. Similarly, if you have less opens but more clicks, you may have missed out on some brilliant opportunities. You similarly have a fantastic offer but still can’t figure out the subject line.
Some other factors can influence your open rates. For instance, the quality of your list, the email address of the sender, or external events can also be a great influencer on your open rates. People’s attention plays a major role which helps to make stable intentions as an email marketer. Tracking clicks by link can help you to identify the same.
5. Unsubscribe Rate
It measures the number of people that unsubscribe from your specific email, which is non-ignorable. However, this KPI is a controversial one that you need to understand clearly.
An unsubscribe rate can give you both good and bad lessons. For instance, if your unsubscribe rate is lower than others, it means that people don’t report your email as spam. Similarly, if your subscription rate is high but open rate is low, you should understand that the recipients have not read your emails so far. In that case, you should remove the unwanted ones from your list, which could help your deliverability. Therefore, you can also save money.
As an email marketer, you have to first think of the intention of your work. It would be best if you had only genuine people who want to know about your company. The segregation of the subscriber list may help you target more valuable people, and you get benefits as well. Many companies use emailing CRM tools which help to make their email marketing centrifugal.
You can have some changes over your unsubscribe rate, which may include: Segmenting demographics, segmenting buyer groups, and changing the frequency of EDMs may help you to reach your destination.
6. Bounce Rate
When you are delivering emails to your clients, it’s also necessary to keep the amount of not delivered emails as low as possible. The bounce rate measures the same.
The equation of bounces is- (number of bounces/ number of emails sent)*100= email bounce rate. For instance, you have sent 100 emails, and five emails can’t reachyour recipient’s inbox. It means that you have a 5% bounce rate.
There are two types of bounces in email marketing: hard bounce and soft bounce. In most cases, hard bounces happen for invalid email addresses. When someone leaves a job at a company, the company deletes their account. Still, if you are sending emails to that inbox, the email can increase your bounce rate. Another possibility is if you enter an incorrect email address while sending, it may bounce.
You need to pay more attention to the hard bounces. An increasing hard bounce rate always indicates that you need to catch up on your list clearance. It also suggests that you double-check the email address before sending an email to your recipient.
However, you need not worry more about soft bounces because these are temporary and also manageable. When there seems to be a problem with the receiving end, a soft bounce runs through the system. For instance, if your recipient’s inbox is full or their server is down, your emails may bounce. However, your email service provider or marketing platform may automatically solve the issue and try to resend your email.
There are block bounces and technical bounces as well. Block bounces usually come from a complaint, block list, URL lock, etc. However, technical bounce happens for server problems or network issue errors.
7. Spam Complaints
Sometimes, it’s not up to you even though you are doing so well for your subscribers. Unfortunately, they marked your email as spam without any reason. However, there can be some serious issues on your part also. Your email may violate some rules which a reliable and sincere user never tolerates. You have to fix this problem as soon as possible. For that, you can easily clean your list and ensure that all the remaining ones happily receive your emails. You need to check again and again because it is a fixable problem and easy to do.
Apart from it, your email should also provide legitimate value to your recipients. Value can come in many forms. For instance, Christmas is knocking at the door. You may provide something great through your email, which can help your recipients make extra value. You may also include some entertaining news in your email subject. It can be trending topics in the news or anything else from pastime. Moreover, GIFs are also a good choice to gain extra value from your subscribers.
8. Web Traffic and Conversion Rate
Most email marketers lead their customers to some web property that can make a conversion among them. The conversion rate is the percentage of converting emails in a particular campaign. Let’s figure it out.
Suppose you have sent 100 emails to your customers, out of which five people get coverted. Here you’ll gain a 5% conversion rate. People can complete their conversion online by visiting, purchasing, or downloading something from your email.
You have to keep in mind that conversion differs for different companies. For instance, eCommerce stores take conversion as a sale. However, registration for an event or a meeting schedule can also be recognized as a conversion in digital marketing.
Are you looking for an improved conversion? Well! For that, you need to be more attractive with your email subjects. Moreover, you need to make your clients understand what they get if they click on the web.
You offer, its Calls to Action (CTA) can make a positive and needful image towards your recipients. The above process is worth the effort, as these metrics indicate the percentage of recipients who make your intention successful. These KPIs also help you to achieve your campaign goals.
9. Subscriber List Growth
History proves that common people always play a great role in enhancing the image of a social character. The character can be a businessman, film artist, national player, or even a digital marketer like you. Always remember that your subscribers are behind all your successes. It’s very important to track your subscribers’ list, whether it is growing or declining. However, experts have the least faith in this KPI as it is not always possible to make a constant view in the subscriber list.
Especially if the campaign or email performance is specific, you can hardly find any traces through it. It would be best if you then tried looking at the other mentioned KPIs to reach your goal. Complaints may jump from a specific email to a list form, and the user’s system may decline in response.
All these can also give you indications of what you have to improve in the future.
10. Social Shares and Forwarding Rates
In today’s world, what is reining our society is the social media platform. The social share is such a KPI that indicates engagement of your email content on social media. Therefore, some experts consider this KPI as the most trending one in today’s world of digital email marketing. So, making your content easier may add some social buttons to your email.
If you are giving tremendous content via email, but it is hardly possible to share, you are in great trouble. Sometimes the only link in your email may take the users back to their home page. They have to go through various sub-menus to go back to the blog, which does not have a good impact on your content.
The forwarding rates KPI is almost similar to the social shares with one major difference. If you send content to the recipients through social shares, it may not be as receptive as the forwarding emails. What is the reason behind it? A forward is like replying to someone’s message, which is considerably less in number than social media messages.
This KPI also stands for the engagement rate of the recipients and the quality of your email content. Both of them you usually want to increase.
Conclusion
There are several benefits as well as risks in email marketing. However, it would be best if you went through all the KPIs to make your marketing life flourish. The more you engage with your subscribers, the faster you can achieve your target.
So, what are you waiting for? Go and optimise your email marketing campaign and make a better customer experience, as well as trust in your company.
