Did you know that email marketing has an average return on investment (ROI) of 3,600%? Yes, for every $1 spent on email marketing, businesses can expect an average return of $36 in revenue. That’s why it’s no surprise that email marketing remains a vital tool for businesses.
To achieve results, though, measuring your success is essential. This post is about how to measure the success of an email marketing campaign. Let's get started!
Understanding key email marketing metrics
Delivery rate
The delivery rate shows the percentage of emails that reach your recipients. It’s a crucial and basic metric to track. All good email marketing tools and add-ons offer it in their dashboards or reports.
This is how YAMM displays the delivery rate of your emails right in your Google Sheets.
A high delivery rate indicates that your emails successfully made it to your recipients. You’ll see how many of your emails were received by servers and how many might have been bounced or rejected. However, delivery doesn’t mean that the emails made it to their inbox, as this information is not made available to senders.
Maintaining a good delivery rate is vital for your messages to reach your audience and have the best chance of being opened.
Bounce rate
The bounce rate refers to the percentage of emails that couldn't be delivered to your recipients' inboxes. So, since the delivery rate in the example campaign is 100%, the bounce rate is 0. The higher your delivery rate, the lower the bounce rate gets.
Emails can bounce back because of several reasons. It could be that the recipient's email address is invalid, the server is down, or the receiving inbox is full. It’s important to know the difference between a hard bounce and a soft bounce.
If you have a high bounce rate, it indicates potential issues with your email list quality. It's essential to keep it low to maintain a good sender reputation and deliverability. Regularly cleaning your email list and removing invalid addresses can help reduce bounce rates.
Open rate
The open rate is a critical metric that shows the percentage of recipients who opened and viewed your email. It indicates how engaging and relevant your audience finds your emails.
There are many things you can do to boost your open rate. You can start by crafting compelling subject lines and delivering valuable content. Monitoring this metric allows you to fine-tune your email strategies and ensure your messages grab the attention of your subscribers.
Click-through rate
The click-through rate (CTR) is an important metric that shows the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link or call-to-action (CTA) in your email. This gauges the level of engagement of your email.
A higher CTR indicates that your content and CTA are compelling, while a lower rate might call for adjustments. To improve your CTR, create clear, enticing copy and CTAs that direct readers to valuable landing pages. CTR is an important metric when it comes to A/B testing.
Response rate
Response rate is the percentage of your emails that were responded to by your recipients. These could be replies in any form, questions, reviews, or sometimes just a thank you. It also reflects engagement.
Some marketers don’t consider it an important metric, but it does give an obvious indication of the quality of your subscriber list. A higher response rate is a marker of a highly targeted and engaged audience. It also means that your email likely made it to your recipient’s inbox!
YAMM shows the response rate in the tracking report and displays a “responded” status next to the addresses that have responded to your email.
Unsubscribe rate
The unsubscribe rate shows the percentage of recipients who opted out or unsubscribed from your email list after receiving your message. It indicates how many people decided not to receive your emails anymore.
While unsubscribes from your audience may seem negative, it’s important to remember that a certain amount of churn in your email list is expected. Many experts even believe that unsubscribes are better than being marked as spam.
However, a higher-than-normal or rising unsubscribe rate could indicate a need for more connection with your audience.
Conversion rate
The conversion rate shows the percentage of recipients who took the desired action after clicking a link or a CTA in your email. This action could be making a purchase, filling out a form, subscribing to a service, or any other goal you set for your campaign.
A higher conversion rate means your email content and CTA effectively persuade subscribers. This is a crucial metric that directly measures the success of your email campaigns.
How to measure email marketing success
Set your key performance indicators
What gets measured gets mastered, but you can’t measure everything. Every campaign should have 2-3 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will be your yardsticks for monitoring, measuring, and declaring success.
Think about what you’d like your campaign to achieve. If you’re in the initial stages of your email marketing, you should try to improve your delivery and open rates—those are your KPIs. If you want to enhance engagement, track CTR and response rates. If you’re refining your email marketing campaign, you’d want to focus on minimizing unsubscribes and increasing conversion rates.
Define what counts as success for each campaign.
Check your progress
Next, you have to check those KPIs regularly. Make a schedule or plan. Will you be checking every week or after each email is sent? Here are the most important things to note:
- Are your metrics improving or not?
- Possible cause of improvement.
- Are there any patterns when you send?
Checking your progress regularly and evaluating the KPIs you set for your campaigns is easy, but only when you have the right tool for the job. Picking an email marketing tool that aids rather than deters you from checking your metrics is the key.
See what’s working and what isn’t
When you start making changes, your metrics will change as a result. Have you optimized your subject lines? See if it has an impact on your open rates. It’s like a controlled experiment; you change one variable and then see its effect.
Once again, the tool you choose has a huge impact. That’s why we recommend YAMM!
YAMM provides analytics for email marketing
With YAMM's user-friendly interface, you can effortlessly access powerful analytics for your email campaigns. No more learning complicated and intricate platforms! You can get valuable insights right in your familiar Google Sheets, making it a breeze to analyze open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. Don't miss out on maximizing your results—try YAMM now and take your email marketing game to new heights!