A good email marketing campaign can have a significant impact on the results of your marketing efforts, but each campaign needs to be accurately monitored to determine its success rate. To help you calculate the return on investment (ROI) of an email marketing campaign we have listed some key metrics to keep an eye on.
Open Rate
The open rate of an email campaign is a good metric to track over time and it can signal progress or problems with your email marketing. Likewise, the amount of opens per subscriber is a good rate to look at as it will show if your content is interesting and engaging.
Whilst the open rate is a good indicator of general engagement with your subscribers it is not the most important metric. The open rate of an email campaign can yield unreliable results as image blocking and other factors can stop all opens being accurately tracked.
Click-Through Rate
A more reliable metric than the open rate, but not as reliable as more in-depth metrics such as measuring conversions or revenue generated, the click-through rate measures activity on an email message. Showing which links the subscribers have clicked on, the click-through rate serves as a good indicator of which content is working well within your email messages.
It is also useful to look at the number of clicks per clicker, as higher rates show that subscribers are interested in your content and engaging with it. Good content for an email marketing campaign gives the recipient multiple opportunities and incentives to click on links.
Goals/ Conversions
One of the best ways to measure the results of your email marketing efforts is to establish goals that you want your subscribers to achieve. This can be done using a tool such as Google Analytics and can include events such as making a purchase or downloading a specified item.
Measuring goals and conversion rates will accurately tell you if your email marketing campaign is achieving the results you want.
Share Rate
A high share rate shows that your subscribers find your email useful or entertaining and wish to share it with their network. Not only does this show that you are on the right path with your content, it also increases the amount of people that will see your marketing messages.
Revenue
Many businesses use their email marketing campaigns as a way of generating more leads and increasing revenue. Tracking the revenue resulting directly from a particular email campaign over a set period of time is a brilliant way of establishing an accurate ROI.
Hard Bounce Rates
A hard bounce rate refers to an undelivered email that has failed due to a fault with the recipient’s email address. Marketers need to practice good ‘list hygiene’ and regularly remove bad email addresses to avoid high bounce rates.
Unsubscribe Rates
Much like monitoring the open rate of an email campaign, looking at the unsubscribe rate can give a broad overview of subscriber behaviour. Keeping track of the rise and fall of unsubscribe rates can tell you how your subscribers are reacting to your content.
Complaint Rate
If you find you are getting a lot of unsubscribes and complaints then perhaps people are being misled when they sign up for your emails and are not receiving the information they wanted. Review the ways in which you are building your database and see if you can refine it to target only a relevant audience.
Establishing consistent contact with your database through regular email campaigns should be an important part of your digital marketing strategy. What do you find is the best metric to measure your email campaign success rate? Tweet us @evonomie and let us know!Labels: bounce rate, click through, conversion rate, email marketing, mailchimp, open rate, revenue
