Measuring Email Marketing Success

Numbers tell the tale, especially when it comes to engagement. Metrics will indicate what is working and not working with your current email marketing strategy. They will tell you what areas to concentrate on, what to improve, and what you might consider eliminating altogether. If the numbers show strong results, you can also justify your marketing approach and any adjustments and actions you have to take.

Conversions and revenue are the ultimate two metrics when it comes to business. A healthy number of conversions and revenue coming in show that your hard work was all worthwhile. However, there are other metrics you should pay attention to in order to gauge just how engaged your recipients are with your emails.

Open Rate

This is a hugely important and telling metric. It tells you how many people are opening your emails. A deeper dive into the data can also show you which subject lines are working better than others and what days and times people tend to open your emails the most at.

Click-Through Rate

The click rate tells you who opened your email and clicked through. These are the people who heeded your call to action and are the ones who might turn into conversions.

Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR)

This metric measures the people who opened the email and also clicked through on it, which gives you insights into the levels of interaction your messages are inspiring.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate measures the number of emails that were not delivered and therefore couldn’t be opened. A hard bounce means that the email address you sent to was invalid. A soft bounce happens when the email address is valid, but the inbox was full and couldn’t accept more.

Unsubscribe Rate

These are the people asking to be taken off your email list. You should strive to keep your unsubscribe rate under two percent and to keep the number of unsubscribers lower than the number of new recipients.

Open by Device

Knowing which device your recipients prefer to read your emails on¾be it a desktop, tablet, or phone¾can help you optimize and create a better reading and viewing experience for them.

Spam Rate

Anti-spam software analyzes emails and gives them a score. If the score exceeds a certain threshold (which is typically five), the email is marked as spam. To ensure your email’s deliverability, you need to keep an eye on your spam rate so that does not get too high.

Looking at your metrics will provide insights into where to take your email marketing strategy next and let you know just how your customers and prospects are responding to your email marketing messaging. Do not hesitate to try out different subject lines, copy, and designs to see what gets better results.

See how important data and metrics are to all marketing and business with “Your Customers Can’t Wait Any Longer: They Need You to be Data Literate, Too.”

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