Email marketing is one of the most practiced modes of communication. According to Martech, consumers choose email 77% of the time over other online channels. Having an effective email marketing strategy can both drive engagement with existing customers and generate new sales. Hubspot reports that "80% of business professionals believe that email marketing increases customer retention.” By using carefully selected metrics to measure email campaign success, businesses can achieve their desired outcomes - whether that is driving sales, improving customer loyalty, generating leads, or reduced overall marketing costs.
But what does a successful email marketing campaign look like? Specifically, how do you measure it and when is it good enough to say that the campaign was successful?
Read on for a comprehensive explanation of how to easily build your next Email Marketing Dashboard.
Article Contents:
Important Email Marketing Metrics
Measurement Plan
Having a measurement plan will help you to evaluate your email campaigns. It should include metrics that are both qualitative and quantitative in nature. With an effective measurement plan, you'll also be able to make decisions about what worked or didn't work in your email marketing strategy and improve accordingly.
Timing
Before you set KPIs, it’s important to establish a tracking schedule so that you know the risks and benefits of an email campaign. You should be tracking email campaigns on an ongoing basis. Having a schedule for doing this will help you evaluate the results and find trends. This, in turn, can inform your future strategies for messaging or new product launches. You can compare benchmarks with previous performance, which will make it easy to spot patterns in success or decline for certain email campaigns. Benchmarking is a vital part of this activity because it provides you with context about the performance you are seeing.
Goals and Objectives
Once you have a timeframe determined, each email campaign should be assigned specific goals and objectives. Not setting goals for campaigns or channels is the biggest mistake a B2B marketer can make when doing reporting. By setting objectives for each email campaign, you know what success looks like.
It enables you to measure performance beyond just engagement (i.e., open rates, click-through rates), which is helpful in determining how many sales were generated from these campaigns. For example, by including pipeline as a primary objective, some marketing teams may decide that low engagement numbers are acceptable given the audience, as long as pipeline objectives are met.
If your goal is brand awareness, you might need to use keywords that are less relevant to the product or service. But if your goal is lead generation, then it’s important to be very specific with your messaging in order to educate prospects about your solution and understand whether they’re ready to buy from you or not.
Establishing the objectives of your email marketing campaign are critical to measuring the success down the road.
On-going Optimization
You should always strive for better performance than previously measured benchmarks. Managing expectations through regular benchmarking builds confidence in your business, especially if you’re introducing a new product or service.
Measuring open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and other metrics on an ongoing basis allows you to reveal trends and insights. This enables you to improve your strategy across channels based on performance levels you have previously achieved. In addition to this, you can also benchmark against other industries or competitors to outperform them and gain an upper hand in the market.
Analyzing your audience’s behavior is one of the most helpful ways to determine what content will engage your list, and consequently what type of product offers to share with them.
Important Email Marketing Metrics
There are many ways to measure an email marketing campaign. To gauge the success of an email marketing campaign, it is important to measure the metrics that most align with your goals and understand if you need to make any changes in your strategy.
Open Rate
An open rate is the percentage of people who view your email and click through to open it. This is determined by looking at the number of times an email was opened, as compared to how many emails were successfully delivered. This is crucial to measure because it indicates interest in your content at the highest level. If a recipient received your email in their inbox, but doesn't open it, you know that the first part of your message isn’t grabbing their attention. A/B testing different subject lines can also provide insight into which subjects entice buyers more than others.
You should benchmark against open rates for emails from customers who haven't engaged with you before to see how they compare. In other words, don’t use your previous email open rates as benchmarks because those are just comparing apples to apples. Use fresh benchmarks so you can see where you are now and track improvements over time as you improve in each campaign!
Click-Through Rate
A click-through-rate, or CTR, is the number of people who click on any link in your email divided by the total number of people who received the email. It is a measure of what percentage of the time an email link is actually clicked. So, if you have 3 people click on a link in your email out of 100 recipients, the CTR would be 3%. It is important to track this metric because it indicates engagement with your message. If someone views an email but doesn’t opt-in or respond to any CTA’s within the content, then you know that the second part of your message isn’t grabbing their attention either.
If a subscriber does click on a link within the email (or takes some other action you've defined as meaningful), it's important to understand which links they're clicking on in order for future emails to improve performance regarding those actions.
Bounce Rate
This metric is the percentage of email addresses that were entered incorrectly or that are defunct. These data points are useful for sorting your audience into buckets by engagement, and tracking how many emails are being received in inboxes. Low bounce rates also contribute to a good sender reputation. High bounce rates mean your emails are being sent but not read. This lowers your sender reputation.
There are 2 types of bounces that emails can take—a 'hard bounce' and a 'soft bounce'. Hard bounces mean the email address does not exist. Soft bounces indicate an inbox that's full or is temporarily unavailable usually due to organizational email server or email service provider settings.
According to Campaign Monitor, “the benchmark for bounces is less than 2%”. This metric also helps you understand how effective your email marketing provider is, so if they're causing a higher-than-normal bounce rate, you may want to switch providers - or simply remove unsubscribed members from your database.
Conversion Rate
This measures how many users opt-in or respond to the call to action in your email. A high open rate doesn’t necessarily mean you will see large conversions because they are two separate metrics. The best way to get both is by making sure your calls-to-action are clear in your email and ensure that when someone clicks through, they have easy steps laid out for them as to what to do next (like an opt-in form).
An effective CTA: 1) uses relevant information predicted from prior communications with subscribers; 2) is personalized; and 3) encourages the subscriber to take an action where you can measure the success of how many people were converted.
List Growth Rate
Along with conversion rates, as subscribers opt-out, change companies, or change email addresses, analyzing the list growth rate is key to understanding the health and growth of your email database. You can calculate it by counting how many emails you receive in a month, and compare that to an average baseline over the last six months. If your list is growing faster or slower than expected, there may be a problem or a rousing success with your strategy--so this metric will help you determine what changes need to happen in order for more subscribers to convert into customers!
Unsubscribe Rate
This is the percentage of subscribers that have asked to be removed from your list. It’s important because it provides insight as to whether you are reaching the right audience and providing value through your emails. You want a low unsubscribe rate so you know subscribers are reading your messages.
If this number is high, then along with looking at bounce rates and CTR, you can adjust the calls-to-action in future campaigns based on what subscribers didn't like about past emails. This will help create more successful marketing campaigns in the future!
Once you understand how these metrics work together, do some analysis to see if there are opportunities for improvement within each campaign. If not, analyze them against benchmarks over time to understand if they're improving over time.
Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate
This measures how many times your email has been forwarded to other users. It’s a key metric because it shows that customers feel so strongly about the content of their emails that they want to forward them on! This is one reason why you want to make sure every customer is happy with your product or service and ensure they have an experience worth talking about.
If this number is low, look at the quality of your current leads and if there are any opportunities to improve the overall happiness of customers. You might also consider better segmenting audiences for future campaigns, so maybe re-attempting segmentation would result in more positive results than sending out identical messages to all recipients!
Overall ROI
You can measure your ROI by taking the revenue your company has made through email marketing, and divide it by how much you spend. This value can then be compared to benchmarks over time.
It’s hard to see the big picture of email marketing ROI, but by analyzing your current campaign or campaigns and comparing them against historical benchmarks, you can start to understand what types of email perform better than others. This will help you learn more about your customers and create future campaigns that really resonate with what they want and need!
Email Analytics Platforms
Utilizing email analytics tools allows you to quantify the performance of each campaign (and over time), and look for areas where you can increase click-through rates, conversion rates, list growth rate, etc.
To do this effectively, there are a few tools we recommend trying out:
Hubspot Email Marketing: This platform has a marketing analytics tool that you can use for analyzing email data. It includes statistics like open rates, click-through rates, unsubscribe rates, and more. Through Hubspot, you have the opportunity to manage all your campaign data from one location. It is free, easy to use, and can give you a lot of insight into your email marketing campaigns!
Marketo: Marketo has a more advanced marketing analytics tool than Hubspot. With this platform, you can track the lifetime value of each subscriber by looking at how many times they’ve been engaged with your emails and how much revenue they have brought in. Marketo also allows you to segment your audience based on several different metrics, which helps you narrow down which groups are most engaged with your emails. Another major advantage of Marketo is that it contains landing pages, so you can gauge how well each individual campaign is performing based on how customers respond to calls-to-action in each email.
Eloqua: This software is another option for marketers to analyze their email marketing campaigns. It’s also a great tool if you have an e-commerce store because it can help you track your ROI based on the lifetime value of each customer. Also, if you’re interested in more advanced analytics features like social media monitoring or landing page monitoring, then this platform might be right for you! Eloqua has similar features as Marketo, but it isn’t as robust and more tailored towards those in SaaS and B2B industry (although they do cater to consumers).
Tableau: Tableau is a business intelligence tool that is another great resource for marketers to analyze their email campaigns. It helps to visualize data in the form of charts and graphs to easily identify patterns, which emails perform best, performance over time, and compare KPIs to expected benchmarks. Tableau is known for being a user friendly tool that all professionals and beginners can use and start making decisions quickly.
As a rule of thumb when choosing an email marketing analytics tool, look for features like segmentation and lifecycle reporting--which is especially important if you have multiple campaigns going on at once! Segmentation allows you to sort different groups based on how they interact with your emails so you can get more insight into what types of content resonate best with specific audiences. Lifecycle reporting helps analyze which customers behave differently over time so that marketers can focus on customer engagement instead of just acquisition.
The most important thing to remember when measuring your emails is to compare them against benchmarks from past campaigns (even if they were unsuccessful). This strategy will help you understand why certain emails are doing better than others, so you can realize what works and what doesn’t.
Key Takeaways
Email marketing is a popular and effective way for businesses to reach their target audience. It has the ability to help you grow your customer base with little cost if done properly! So, to properly measure any email marketing campaign, you'll need to gather a variety of metrics and email analytics (to see specific details about each campaign). The more you optimize these key metrics through testing different campaigns, the better your chances are of creating successful emails! By continuing to send relevant offers that customers actually like (and forwarding them on to others), you will see greater ROI over time and can continue to grow your customer base.
If you still need help or don’t have analytics resources within your organization, contact Optimax Business Consulting to help you create an effective Email Marketing Dashboard. We will make sure that you're measuring the right metrics and properly optimizing your email campaign for the greatest ROI.
Join the conversation: Is email marketing your most used channel? Do you think it's still effective and how are you measuring it today? Let us know what techniques you use for your email marketing campaigns in the comment section below!
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