Email marketing campaigns - 8 vital metrics to track

Abe Dearmer

Oct 15, 2019

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7 min read

CRM

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways of communicating with your prospects and customers - and can help you reach large audiences. Email marketing campaigns result in higher engagement and better customer satisfaction, while allowing marketers to find a lot of leads.

But even the most effective campaign is not used to the fullest if the right metrics aren't tracked. Every marketer knows that the key to running a successful email marketing campaign is tracking the vital metrics that will help you determine whether your campaign is on the right track or not.

Without this insight, how will you know how your camping is doing, and what needs to be improved?

In order to take your marketing game to the next level, you need to ensure you are keeping a check on imperative metrics that can help you understand the high points and low points of your campaign, in turn tweaking what isn't working.

Here are some of the most important metrics every marketer needs to track if they want to run successful email marketing campaigns.

Open Rate

The open rate is one of the first metrics every marketer looks at, since it simply means how many people have opened the emails you sent. The Open Rate observed across all industries is 24.88%, so if you think you're below that, it's time to change the way you write emails.

Try more interesting subject lines and change the tone and style of your content to match what your prospects are looking for instead. Try some A/B testing to properly know what you audience likes, and what they don't.

Unsubscribe Rate

Whenever we see emails in our inbox that don't seem to interest us, or we feel we haven't signed up for, we scroll to the bottom of the email and hit the 'unsubscribe' button. Tracking the unsubscribe rate means keeping an eye on how many people keep leaving your emailing lists.

The fact that someone is unsubscribing, means that they don't want to hear from you and aren't interested in the products and services you have to offer. With an industry average of 0.25%, your goal should be to keep it at a low minimum.

The best way to do that is to segment your audience and only send relevant information that each customer wants to get. Use simple opt-ins with multiple options to understand what your customer is looking for when they receive your emails.

Bounce Rate

When you email people, some emails sometimes "bounce" and don't get delivered to the recipient. There are 2 types of bounced emails - soft bounce and hard bounce.

Soft bounce is when your email was sent to an email id that is valid, but it was not delivered because of reasons such as a full inbox, the email was too large or the server was down. A hard bounce, on the other hand, is an email that bounces because it was sent to an invalid email id.

The average soft bounce rate is 0.63%, while the hard bounce rate is 0.44%. If you get a soft bounce from an email id, resending the email in a while can help it be delivered as the causes for the earlier bounce can change. But if you keep reaching a bounce from the same email id constantly, there could be another problem and you should cease emailing them.

With hard bounce rates, if you're above the average, it is time you look into your emailing lists and clean them up. Having too many invalid email ids on your emailing list can mean that you need to go through it and sort it out, while also changing the way you collect emails so incorrect emails aren't collected in the first place.

Spam Rate

Tracking this metric shows how many people have marked your email as spam in their inbox. The industry standard for this is very low at just about 0.02%, but the easiest way to keep it low is by only emailing people who are looking forward to receiving your emails.

Reusing old emailing lists or ones that have been bought will only increase your spam rate and unsubscribe rate. Keeping your database updated and clean at all times and removing unwanted email addresses can help keep it under control.

Opens Per Device

With new technology in hand, we rarely ever use our desktops and laptops to check emails, and smart phones are the popular way to go, due to their convenience. Since there are so many options for where to open an email, you must make sure your emails are properly optimised for all screen sizes.

The metric that tracks Opens Per Device, helps you understand what percentage of people open it from which device, so you can make sure they are getting emails that are perfectly fitted to the screen of their choice. On an average, 47% of all emails sent are read on mobile phones, which shows how important screen optimisation is. Without it, the receiver will have to keep scrolling to even read one sentence.

Click Through Rate

Every email we send should have a clear Call To Action (or CTA) that compels the reader to click on a link or take the next step towards making a purchase from you. Click Through Rate means the percentage of people who clicked on this CTA.

With an industry average of 4.06%, which is already low, Click Through Rate is what lands the customer to the next step. If you're below average, you may want to look at your email content and see if there is a clear action for the reader to execute. Make sure your message is clear and your CTA is attention grabbing.

Click To Open Rate

This metric is important because it compares the number of people who 'clicked' your email to the number of people who 'opened' it. This percentage shows that your subject line was compelling enough to open the email but maybe the content in the email wasn't as compelling for them to click through to your CTA.

The industry average for Click To Open Rate is 16.31%, so to make sure you match it, work on the text of your email. If your subject lines are enough to get people to open your email, but your email isn't, make sure to work on that last step.

Delivery Rate

Simply put, Delivery Rate is the number of emails that were successfully delivered to the intended inbox. Many times emails are blocked from reaching a certain inbox and they bounce, as we discussed above.

In fact, nearly 20% of emails sent don't reach the inbox they are meant to, with the highest reason for this being internal email gateways blocking these emails. It is important to make sure to take precautions to not be considered as spam and to also minimise your bounce rate.

With the number of email users growing everyday steadily, it is impossible to deny that email marketing is a simple and straightforward way to get in touch with leads and customers, without being too invasive. Making sure you analyse and measure each of these metrics is the key to success and growing.

Now that you've understood how important it is to keep track of these parameters and metrics, the next step is to use a Customer Relationship management System that helps with email marketing. It will not just help you in bettering your campaign, but also keep track of these very metrics. It can help provide automatically created graphs and detailed analysis for each segment you want to monitor, and greatly reduce the manual work you would have to do to achieve this otherwise.

Try FIVE CRM, and find out the benefits of using a CRM platform for email marketing!

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“Each client, and each of their campaigns, has its own unique specifications. We essentially needed to set up mini CRMs on one platform to meet those requirements.”