Email Marketing: Metrics That Matter

Email marketing is one of the best ways to directly contact your audience. Just like any other digital platform, the analytics need to be regularly monitored to gain clarity on what’s working. We generally know what to routinely check, such as open and unsubscribe rate. But which numbers will tell you the nitty gritty details on the progress you’ve made? Here are the top 5 email marketing metrics to keep an eye on:

Conversion Rate

When a subscriber completes an action on your email, such as clicking on a call to action on a newsletter or making a purchase from a drip email, this contributes to your conversion rate. You know how much money you’re putting into these emails, but how much are you getting back? These insights can give you a more well rounded point of view on your return on investment in your emails. 

Click Through Rate

Emails with hyperlinks make the job easier for subscribers to find exactly what you want them to find. Your CTR measures how many people actually opened those links or a single one. This is an easy way to check daily on how well your email performs in terms of providing your subscribers quality, engaging content that will lead them into, well, a lead!

Forwarding Rate

You know that your content is really good when your subscribers deem it worthy of sharing to their friends, family and followers, increasing your forwarding rate. Not only does it show you what you should continue doing and not doing in your email campaigns, sharing online also increases your chances of increasing your subscriber list through word of mouth, one of the best ways to refer someone.

Bounce Rate

Have you ever sent an email to the wrong person, and you immediately get a response that says that that email address doesn’t exist? Well, that could go both ways. Bounce rates measure how many people in your subscriber list who may not receive your messages. 

There are two types: Hard bounces and soft bounces. Hard bounces are campaigns that absolutely do not go though, either because the subscriber has an invalid email address or their server has blocked your server. Soft bounces are campaigns that do not go through for a short period of time because the subscriber’s inbox is full, their server isn’t working, or the campaign itself exceeds the size limit set by the subscriber or email service provider.

Email addresses involved with hard bounces should be removed from subscriber lists. Although a high subscriber list is great, having good quality interaction with your subscribers who actually get your emails is even better. Not to mention that if you keep those subscribers, your sender reputation can trigger spam filters, making your campaigns unseen by anyone. If your hard bounces derive from the same domain; that could mean that a specific ISP or company server is blocking you. To help prevent your bounce rate from increasing, you could send your subscribers a drip email to verify their email address.

Overall ROI

At the end of the day, the return on investment in your email campaigns can demonstrate how much you got out of your time and money. This includes your generated leads, revenue and other tangible results and numbers to share with your boss and the rest of your team during the next meeting.