Email marketing is a proven gold mine that has never fallen out of favor. Although you invest enormous time and effort into your email marketing operations, none will matter unless you gauge your campaign’s performance.
With the right KPIs, you can measure your email marketing campaign and deliver your emails to the right audience. Here in this article, let us discover some essential metrics that can help you fine-tune your email marketing approach and set you on the right path:
1. Open rates
Your open rate lets you know how many recipients have opened your emails. Since “email opening ” is your users’ first action, tracking this metric becomes crucial. In addition, the open rate gives you insight into your subject lines and signals whether they can elicit a response from your readers. Consider conducting an A/B test to see which subject lines can result in higher open rates.
Related: 25+ powerful prospecting email subject lines for small businesses
This metric or KPI can indicate how well your emails resonate with your audience, which is the most crucial factor for any marketer to discover. Therefore, you should immediately employ this metric and focus on your subscribers’ engagement.
2. Click-through rates
Open rates can be easier to achieve, but getting someone to take action can take time and effort. Especially obtaining “clicks” from the audience is a bigger task and much more critical for today’s business.
Clicks can land your audience at the intended destination of the link. That’s great, but how will you know if your campaigns are receiving enough clicks? Click-through rates can help you measure the number of clicks on your email. Typically, these rates are much lower than open rates. Because as said earlier, opening an email is far more straightforward than reading its entire content. However, one effective way to boost click-through rates is to ensure your emails are personalized.
This KPI can be a significant indicator of whether the content inside your email is compelling. If you have made numerous changes to your content and are still waiting to receive the desired click-through rates, you need to target the right audience. That means you need to shift to the right ones! The importance of click-through rates in nurturing your emails cannot be underestimated. Therefore, add this metric to your analysis strategy and optimize your campaigns.
3. Bounce rates
For every marketer, the first task isn’t enticing the recipient to open the emails. Instead, it’s about ensuring your email has landed in the recipient’s box. Bounce rates are classified into two categories:
- Hard bounces: invalid or mistyped email addresses are often the reason for hard bounces. You need to immediately remove such bounces from your email list because they are dead, and you will never be able to deliver an email to your audience.
- Soft bounces: These bounces are typically associated with a problem on the receiving end. Here, the user’s email address is right, but for some reason, your message fails to reach your subscribers and instead bounces back to you.
Pay close attention to your bounce rate since it may indicate that you need to catch up on cleaning up your list of invalid email addresses. You can reduce your bounce rate by using the double-opt-in method, which asks your recipients to confirm their email subscriptions. Or simply, your email service provider can also decrease your bounce rates. These techniques can ensure high-quality email lists and lower bounce rates.
4. Conversion Rates
But how can you tell if your email marketing campaign turns recipients into customers? The answer is conversion rates.
The conversion rate shows the percentage of recipients who click the links in your email and take the next desired step. Knowing the number of subscribers who convert into sales makes it easier to determine whether your marketing efforts are paying off.
5. List growth rate
Did you know that an email marketing list naturally degrades around 22.5% annually? (source). Besides keeping track of your conversion and open rates, you should also aim to grow your email list. However, how will you be able to tell if the number of email subscribers on your list is expanding or dwindling? Well, the list growth rate can help you track the rate at which your mailing list is growing. This way, you can keep a close eye on the numbers and actively work to grow your email list.
6. Unsubscribe rate
Your email campaigns should be monitored based on this KPI. The insights you gain from it are informative. For example, the unsubscribe rate tells you the number of recipients who have unsubscribed from your email list. Prioritize this metric because it can help refine your email to those truly engaged.
With KPIs, you can boost your overall marketing efforts. Additionally, they can serve as excellent benchmarks and provide you with a rough estimate of how you fare against the field of your competitors. Now that you are familiar with the fundamental marketing KPIs keep an eye on the health of your subscriber list and lay a strong foundation for your marketing operation. The metrics above will help you gain glorious insights and predict your success or shortcomings. Therefore, you can improve your email marketing outreach and consistently deliver your audience the most suitable content.
