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.