What email marketing metrics are the most meaningful for your business?

Gautam Mane, February 26, 2019

Digital marketers have so many weapons in their arsenals today. But of all those ways of promoting a product or service, email marketing still remains one of the most popular. It is also considered to be the easiest. But the only issue with email marketing is that people tend to forget to check how effective the campaign is.

The most important thing that is needed in a good email marketing campaign is to gauge its effectiveness. There are several popular metrics that can be used to see how effective the emails are. Here is a brief list of five of the email marketing metrics which are the most meaningful for your business.

1. Deliverability :

People think that the most important thing to know about an email is how many people are opening it, or how they are reacting to it. But the thing to be checked comes even before that. As an email marketer, you must be aware of how many of the mails you send in a particular campaign are even reaching the recipient’s inbox. This doesn’t have anything to do with the recipient’s response to your email, but it depends on how the email server of the recipient is reacting to your email id. It also depends on whether you have got the email id right.

2. Opening:

Once the email you send has been delivered to the inbox of your intended recipient, there are three things that could happen to it. It could automatically go to the trash folder because of a filter. Or it can be pushed to the trash folder by the recipient without opening it. Or it could be opened by the recipient. You need to be able to measure how many of the emails you send in a particular campaign fall in the third category, and that is your open rate which you must try to maximize.

3. CTR:

This is short for click-through rate. In the mails you send as part of your email campaign, you would usually add a few links which you want the recipient to click on. The click through rate tells you what percentage of your recipients have actually done that. After reaching the inbox of the inbox and getting the recipient to open the mail, this is the third thing that you would want to happen to your emails.

4. Conversion:

After the above three hurdles have been crossed, you come to the real reason for sending the email. There is something that you want the recipient to sign up for, or buy, or agree to, and the real proof of your success is whether or not that is done. All the four metrics we just named are in the form of a percentage, and the four numbers should be in the form of a pyramid.

5. Social:

Outside of these 4 metrics, another important (and useful) indicator of the success of your email campaign is how much of it got shared on social media. This would really have a cascading effect on your efforts, so being able to measure it and take insights from it is really important.