What Email Marketing Metrics should you be Measuring?

While e-mail marketing metrics are hugely important they can also be confusing. Even the word ‘metric’ is more complex that it needs to be. In the digital marketing space, metrics are simply measurements. We’re interested in metrics because they give us a way to find out if our e-mails are getting better or worse and what we can do to improve them.

Here are the 11 of the most widely tracked and reference e-mail marketing metrics.

Email marketing metrics to measure

Open rate

‘Open rate’ refers to how many people opened your e-mail message. It’s not too complex on the surface but it does get murkier from there because some e-mail clients – for example Yahoo – automatically open e-mails which skews this measurement.

Click through rates

These are also pretty simple to understand. If someone clicks one of the links in your e-mail message you’ve got a click. The click-through rate, measured as a percentage, is how many recipients out of one hundred clicked somewhere on your e-mail message. If 25 out of 100 people clicked you’ll have a 25% click through rate.

Unsubscribe rate

What you should look for is a spike in unsubscribes. It’s a clear sign you sent an e-mail in one of your digital marketing campaigns that people didn’t like.

Hard bounces

If you ignore hard bounces it can get you into trouble. These types of bounces happen when you’ve sent a message to an e-mail address that no longer exists.

Soft bounces

Soft bounces occur mainly when you send an e-mail to an inbox that is full. As soon as that person deletes a few e-mails they’ll get your new e-mail.

Delivery rate

A very bad delivery rate would be 80%. Anything above 95% is usually good enough not to worry about.

Forward rate

This is a happy metric. It measures how often people open, read and then liked your e-mail message so much so that they sent it along to someone else. Forward rates are sometimes referred to as referral rates or share rates.

How to determine your KPIs for e-mail marketing

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives. Organisations use KPIs at multiple levels to evaluate their success at reaching targets.

In terms of developing a strategy for formulating KPIs, your team should start with the basics and understand what your organisational objectives are, how you plan on achieving them and who can act on this information.

E-mail metrics and KPIs are values used by marketers and marketing teams to measure the impact of e-mail campaigns. E-mail marketing is a fundamental part of any business which drives visits to a website and converts web users into leads. In recognising valuable KPIs you are able to track not only your successes but campaigns that perhaps missed the mark.

How to define a KPI

Defining a KPI can be a tricky business. The operative word in KPI is “key” because every KPI should they are related to a specific business outcome. KPIs are often confused with business metrics although often used in the same spirit KPIS but need to be defined according to critical business objectives.

Steps to follow when defining a KPI:

• What is your desired outcome?
• Why does this outcome matter?
• How are you going to measure progress?
• How can you influence the outcome?
• Who is responsible for the business outcome?
• How will you know you’ve achieved your outcome?
• How often will you review progress toward the outcome?

What are some e-mail marketing KPIs?

E-mail marketing KPIs help brands to understand how well their campaigns are performing and whether they might need to make changes to their strategy. It’s not enough to simply create an e-mail marketing initiative if you don’t want take advantage of the countless benefits which can be offered. In today’s hyper-connected world you need to know how to communicate with your audience in the most productive and efficient ways. And that‘s why KPI tracking is so crucial.

Some examples of common e-mail marketing KPIs that are tracked are:

• Consumption metrics,
• Sharing and engagement metrics,
• Lead generation metrics, and
• Sales metrics.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

By looking at the data that your e-mail marketing generates you can begin to make clever and informed decisions about how to enhance future campaign. Want to learn more about e-mail marketing campaigns? The Digital School of Marketing’s Digital Marketing Course will help you do this! Read more here and visit our website to find out more regarding our other online digital marketing courses.