The health and performance of your email marketing campaigns relies heavily upon the regular measurement and management of metrics. The main email marketing metrics that should be measured and prove to be effective include:
Email Opening Rate
Email Opening Rate is calculated based on the overall number of times emails are opened, which is tracked on a weekly basis. Boosting your rate of emails opened depends upon the name of the sender and the subject of your email. Measuring this metric is important because this tells just how well your emails are being opened and read. Some email platforms like Constant Contact or Mail Chimp have those analytics reports built into each email campaign, to help test and gage success of campaigns. It’s important to review the success of each campaign so you can make adjustments according.
Sometimes segmenting your email distribution list will yield higher open rates. For example, if you are a tax accountant and have both individual and small business clients, you wouldn’t send your individuals information about how to prepare for business taxes or quarterly tax payments. It’s important to know your audience in order to yield the best results!
Click Rate
This is calculated based on the percentage of total clicks and delivery of emails on a weekly basis. The main goal of your email campaign should be the click through rate of links within your email, so being able to measure this metric proves to be helpful. Your anchor text (example: Click Here or Book Now), location of link within the content of email, leading up copy to the link and the number of times the link is included in the email impacts your click through rate. You always want to incorporate a call to action with your anchor text. Something that tells the reader what to do next. All links should be strategically incorporated in email campaigns in order to receive the best results.
Unsubscribe Rate
The unsubscribe rate connected to you email campaign is calculated by the number, of persons who press unsubscribe. The unsubscribe rates can easily increase as result of unclear email subjects, weak welcome, irregular, or too frequent emails.
Unsubscribing is a part of all email marketing campaigns and comes along with the territory. It’s important that you’re sending emails only to people who have signed up to receive your email. The deliverability of the emails may depend on a low unsubscribe rate.
Criticism Rate/ Spam Reports
The complaints and criticism rate of your email recipients is marked by the percentage of persons who place report the email as spam. An increase in the “criticism rate” can be considered normal, but too many is frowned upon by email providers. Again, this lends itself to the deliverability of your campaigns. If you’re receiving too many spam reports per email campaign you are not only impacting your messages ability to be delivered, but potentially impacting the email providers reliability with other servers. If you’re sending excessive emails, content that is irrelevant or outdated, or simply sending email campaigns to lists purchased versus organically subscribed, you could see an increase in spam reports.
Bounced Rate
The bounced rate of your email is the percentage of your total emails sent which weren’t successfully sent to your addressee’s inbox. This can happen for many reasons including wrong email address entered, auto-reply statuses, or blocking of incoming emails. It’s important to periodically scrub your email list. You don’t want to continue sending email campaigns to addresses that are undeliverable as it impacts the open rates and the success of the campaigns.
Bottom Line
There is so much more to consider with email marketing then preparing the email. You want your emails to be opened, read, and clicked on. If you’re looking to spruce up your email marketing strategy, give Strategic Online Marketing a call. We analyze the reports, develop a strategy, create the content and work toward increased opens. The ultimate goal is qualified leads. Let us help you engage with them!
