What email marketing metrics do you track?

Arun Pillai, February 19, 2019

Any marketer would tell you that every activity they carry out is only as good as the results it brings in. Because email marketing is quite easy to carry out, you can send your message to thousands of people at the click of a button. That is why it is possible that marketers sometime keep on carrying out email campaigns without pausing to see how well those emails are working.

Are they actually converting prospects to customers? Or are they driving away present customers? Or are they doing neither, and simply being dispatched to the recycle bin?

Tracking the efficacy of email campaigns

A marketer needs to continuously track the efficacy of the emails that are being sent out. That will not only tell the marketer if any change is needed, but they might also let the marketer know when it is a good time to stop.

If you are using email marketing as an element of your digital marketing strategy, you should have your fingertips on the pulse of some important indicators. That would help you make the emails more incisive and productive.

But there are scores of things to measure. Not all of them might actually help you. Let us discuss three marketing metrics that you should measure for sure.

CTR (Clickthrough Rate) – Every marketing mail contains one or more links of websites or webpages that the marketer wishes the recipient to visit. The CTR is calculated as a percentage of recipients who clicked on at least one of those links.

So if your mailing list has 5500 recipients, and the links in a particular mailer received a total of 300 clicks on all the links provided by you, then your CTR would be 300/5500 x 100 = 5.45%. This is a very simple and basic indicator of how many people you are able to enthuse enough to actually do what you want them to do.

Conversion – Clicking on a link you provided is often only half of what you want the recipients to do. Once they reach the page whose link you have shared, they might be needed to do something. Your conversion rate is the percentage of people who actually completed that desired action.

Bounce Rate – Like the CTR is a positive measure of your effectiveness, the bounce rate gives you the percentage of email ids in your mailing list that you could not reach. The failure could be due to some temporary problem with the mail server (in which case the server will probably keep trying and deliver successfully in a day or two).

Or the failure could be because the email id is wrong. The second category is what you should be worried about, because not only will you have to remove the email id from your list, but you will have to make efforts to find the current / correct email id of that person so that it can be added back to your list.

An increasing bounce rate means that you are not devoting enough time to the hygiene of your mailing list, and you are wasting a lot of energy on non-existing email ids.

Here’s a quick bonus

We discussed three KPIs. Here’ a fourth one. Open rate.

Open rate is the ratio of people who open your emails, to the total number of emails sent out. Consider, you sent it out to 1000 addresses, 100 bounced, 600 were opened, and five people clicked on your CTA (call to action). You have a bounce rate of 10%, open rate of 60%, and CTR of 0.5%.

What each metric tells you

If the open rate is low, your subject line is not compelling enough. Try new ones.

If the bounces are high, you need to clean up your email database.

If CTR is less, you need to improve your email copy, so that people feel compelled to click the CTA.

Wish you better, more powerful campaigns with high results.