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Analyzing emails carries a lot of weight as it gives you an accurate image of how well your emails work for your audience. But performing this analysis isn't easy—data science is often a bit dry, easy to get wrong, and time-consuming.
But don't worry! In this article, we'll go over the most important metrics you can use to measure the success of your email campaigns. With a better understanding of email marketing KPIs, you’ll be able to increase your email revenue across the board. We'll also give you benchmarks to help you figure out what numbers you should be aiming for.
Email analytics refers to the art of tracking how your subscribers respond to your emails. Email marketers often look at email delivery, engagement, and conversions, among other metrics.
These figures give you a clear picture of how well things are going, such as the level of user engagement and loyalty, common patterns of behavior, and the good and bad parts of your content. With this information, you can use advanced behavioral segmentation to give your subscribers a more tailored experience. You can also use this data to inform how you look at your audience (including in creating a customer journey map!).
So, what email metrics should you be using?
Fear not! We've got you covered. First, we'll talk about the metrics that every email marketer should be keeping track of. Then, we'll look at how to connect certain metrics to your own goals.
Your subscription rate is how many people sign up for your newsletter over a certain amount of time. Here's how to calculate it:
Subscribe Rate = [ (Number of new subscribers) - (Number of unsubscribes)/Total number of email addresses on your list ] * 100
Subscription rates are very industry-specific, but as long as you gain more subscribers than you lose, you're good.
Your unsubscribe rate is critical for knowing how many people have lost interest in your marketing efforts or brand. Here's how to calculate it:
Unsubscribe Rate = [ Number of unsubscribers/Total number of email delivered ] * 100
To reduce unsubscribe rates, restrict how frequently you send emails to less engaged consumers and make your emails relevant to the person receiving them. Unsubscribes will always occur, but increases in your unsubscribe rate should prompt an investigation on your part.
On a campaign level, unsubscribe rates should be less than 0.5%.
Note: We also propose incorporating spam complaints into this measure as they are considered unsubscribes but are handled differently.
Your open rate is another essential deliverability measure since it demonstrates that emails reach clients' inboxes and that either the brand or the subject line piqued their interest. Because counting all openings might bias the statistics, most brands only factor unique openings into their open rate.
Here's how to calculate it:
Open Rate = [Number of customers who opened the email/number of emails delivered] * 100
Senders with a healthy list and an engaged audience often achieve 30 - 40% open rates on bulk emails. At least 20% plus is the ideal benchmark to strive for.
Here are some open rate benchmarks for specific types of emails:
Source: SmartInsights
You may enhance your open rate by A/B testing various things like the time that you send your emails, the subject line utilized, the sender name, pre-header, or customization in the subject line.
Your click rate reveals how many consumers clicked on your Call To Action (CTA) or link out of everyone who got your email. Here's how to calculate it:
Click Rate = [Number of clicks on your emails/Number of emails sent ] * 100
A low click rate may indicate that people didn't see your CTA as "clickable" — maybe it wasn't interesting looking, maybe it looked spammy, or maybe it annoyed them.
A low click rate is one of 2% or under. Anything over 3% is fairly good.
Your bounce rate alerts you to how many of your emails are permanently undeliverable. A high bounce rate is anything above 1%.
A high bounce rate might be caused by being banned or sending emails to defunct email addresses. If you're getting a high bounce rate, look at the status messages or code returned to you to figure out what's happening.
Here's how to calculate your bounce rate:
Bounce Rate = [Number of emails bounced/Number of emails sent ] * 100
Some email providers will restrict a domain with a bounce rate of 1% or higher for bulk marketing since it shows poor email list health. Generally, it would help if you strived to maintain your bounce rate below 0.55% — the recommendation from the email marketing giant MailerLite:
Source: MailerLite
No matter how good your email and eCommerce analytics are, spending your whole day poring over statistics won’t get you anywhere, nor will ignoring them. We offer a five-step method for making the most of your data, outlined below:
Schedule time to review your email stats as a monthly or weekly ritual. Use a spreadsheet to keep tabs on the data that matters. You should provide both the total and per-email count.
Schedule a separate analytics check-in after a significant lead generation campaign or the release of a new product. Email data can help you assess the success of these.
Also, it's a good idea to have a more in-depth analytics check-in at the end of each quarter and year. This will allow you to review data from prior months to spot trends over a longer period. Often, these seasonal trends don't appear when you look at weekly or monthly data.
In general, these are the three steps that are taken when marketers examine data from their email marketing campaigns:
We recommend expanding these steps and adding in a deeper analysis of consumer behavior, demographics, and content trends. Here are some questions you might want to answer in this analysis:
These details will allow you to direct your client acquisition efforts toward the customers most likely to become repeat buyers. Your advertising team may also benefit from the information provided by your customer profiles when deciding which medium to use in distributing their messaging.
When you have a firm grasp of the data and your customer profiles are up to date, you can utilize this information to guide the direction of your content creation efforts. Here are some of the ways you might refine your content:
Review the notes you took throughout the introspection phase to help you with this. Keep an eye on what works and what doesn't when it comes to different kinds of material. You may even look at specific emails to get a sense of their layout, tone, and the details they provide.
With your newfound knowledge, consider the following questions:
When optimizing your email content, start by reviewing your planned actions for the next three months of email marketing. Then, improve your engagement rates over the next month by identifying individual emails that can be updated or replaced. Keep track of the changes you want to make and the alternatives you intend to use and compare their success.
When people sign up for your newsletter, they will automatically receive a welcome sequence of emails. You can customize these emails for each individual user to build stronger bonds with them and provide some opt-in incentive.
Here's an example of a personalized email we really like. This email teases the contents of the newsletter and relates to the reader using something they are already interested in. Quite clever, really.
It's crucial to optimize your newsletters to increase readership. Here are some suggestions to help you optimize:
Make sure you always consider readability above else — you don't want your emails to come across as stale.
Several factors should be considered if the results you expect from your marketing emails aren't what you hoped for. These factors include:
Always keep in mind how the customer will benefit from your offerings. If they are all about you, you run the risk of boring customers.
Customer profiles are useful for gaining insight into your target market. To achieve this, you'll need to imagine a customer that symbolizes a subset of your current or future clientele. Every company needs at least three distinct personas to draw from:
You may wish to create many profiles in each group if your product or service is suitable for a wide variety of consumers. For instance, if you offer high-end kitchen appliances, you may wish to segment your "best client" profiles into "first-time homebuyers" and "stay-at-home mothers."
In terms of the content of these profiles, consider including:
Email analytics data may be used to expand these profiles over time.
Marketers use lead generation strategies to attract new email subscribers through social media and websites. Social media efforts may range from straightforward strategies like adding a form to the sidebar of your website to the intricate ones.
Website-based lead generation strategies include:
Email analytics is the best friend of any successful marketer. To make sure you get the most out of them, make sure you:
Seems a bit too much for one person? Enter Triple Whale! Triple Whale is an eCommerce tool that provides you with improved financial, tracking, reporting, and ROI insights. Advanced tools like Triple Pixel, Cohort Analytics, and Predictive Calculator that help you track emails and finances are what make Triple Whale a killer deal for any organization.
For any journey, there must first be a single step. Boost your email marketing results by scheduling a demo with Triple Whale today!
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