Have you ever sent out numerous email marketing campaigns and felt utterly lost with what to do afterwards?
Did you attempt to look at the countless metrics associated with them? Or, on the other hand, gave up and started on a new project?
If you’re nodding profusely, then this blog may be for you.
Measuring the success of your email campaigns doesn’t have to be as hard as we all think.
As you know, email marketing is one of the world’s renowned channels that a significant number of companies use to get themselves in front of their audience. Even now, there are 4 billion daily email users.
Yes, you read correctly – 4 BILLION daily email users!
Even more so, approximately 64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach their customers.
So, there’s no wonder why you need to not only stay with email marketing but also maximise it to the best of your ability. The only way you can do that is by tracking and measuring your campaigns.
Doing this will allow you to adjust your campaigns to enable better results.
So, with that being said, we have compiled three techniques you can use to help you measure the success of your company’s email marketing.
Set goals
The first technique that should be implemented for all campaigns is your goals. Your goals will ideally be the basis for whether or not your campaign was a success.
Without it, you will not have a definite answer to what you need to focus on for future campaigns.
Here are a few common goals you can use for your email marketing:
- Sales
- Brand awareness
- Engagement
PS. These marketing goals will help you set some key performance indicators to help you identify how effective your campaign was.
Choose the best email KPIs for your business
As highlighted (only slightly) in the previous technique, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are metrics that will help you understand how your projects are performing.
KPIs are used for most, if not all, marketing channels like social media, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), paid search (PPC), etc.
There are so many important email marketing metrics to track, so instead of getting bogged down with the different types of metrics in email marketing, only focus on what you think is most beneficial for your business.
When you send an email through an email marketing platform, it will track the number of areas provided in a summarised report. If you have created several campaigns previously, you would have the opportunity to review and compare these email campaign metrics.
While there’s a significant number of key email marketing reporting metrics you can view, we’ll only cover the most common ones. Remember to look at what will be most meaningful to your business goals.
- Deliverability
“The ability to deliver emails to subscribers’ inboxes”, Campaign Monitor
One of the most important email marketing success metrics to look at is the deliverability percentage.
This metric is helpful to know as it’ll determine how many emails successfully made it to your subscribers’ email inbox.
If the percentage is low, you’ll know that something is wrong and your emails were unsuccessful due to it bouncing.
On the other hand, if it’s high, you’ll know that your campaign successfully reached the intended inboxes.
- Hard and soft bounces
“When an email cannot be delivered to an email server, it’s called a bounce”, Mailchimp.
Bounces go hand in hand with deliverability.
There are two types – soft and hard bounces that can occur when sending out a cluster of emails.
A soft bounce means that your email platform has found a temporary reason, like an inbox that’s full and, therefore, cannot send to that specific person.
On the other hand, a hard bounce is a permanent reason your email campaign has not reached them. It is usually due to an incorrect email address.
- Open rate
“Percentage of subscribers who open a specific email out of your total number of subscribers”, Campaign Monitor
In practicality, if you find that most of your subscribers are opening your email, it simply means that they find your emails relevant.
On the other hand, if you find a limited number of subscribers opening your email, then you guessed it, they don’t see your email as rather interesting.
Of course, there are many possibilities why they wouldn’t open it. However, one reason you will need to think about is whether your subject line was the cause.
One way of checking this for future campaigns is to do A/B testing with alternative subject lines. This will help you gain a better insight into whether this may cause your low open rate.
- Click-through rate
“The ratio of the number of clicks on a specific link or call to action”, Hotjar
Once a subscriber opens your email and decides to click through to your CTA, it indicates that they are even more interested in the content you have created.
This is another one of the crucial email marketing engagement metrics, as it will make you aware of what kind of content your subscriber is interested in and what is worth doing again in future campaigns.
Likewise, taking a look at this metric will allow you to see what is not doing well and what will need to be adjusted for future campaigns.
Review your email’s impact on other campaigns and your business
This goes back to the first initial technique – setting your goals, as you won’t know what you are trying to achieve without it.
While your email marketing goals help you understand if your campaign is working or not, there should be several key marketing performance indicators that will tie into it for your overall business objectives.
Businesses can use many KPIs to understand whether their email marketing contributes significantly or poorly to their overall business objectives.
However, the three main KPIs that businesses should start with are conversion rate, return on investment and cost per acquisition.
Bonus: turn measurements into action
Now that you have found all of the relevant metrics and KPIs for your next campaign, the question is, what do you do next?
You simply turn the measurements into actions, as we highlighted before.
Just think about it; you now understand what areas to focus on for future email marketing campaigns; therefore, there’s no need to guess your campaign performances.
Instead, when you’re about to start your next campaign, review the metrics of the previous one to discover what you may need to alter. Remember, you could even introduce A/B testing to figure it out.
To be honest, this would possibly be the quicker method towards the success of your email marketing strategy.
Either way you choose, we hope you understand that measuring the success of your email marketing is, of course, important.
Without it, your strategy will likely end up in a revolving door, unsure of which way to go next.
If you need more simple tips and techniques to level up your email marketing, why not get in touch? Click to find out about our email marketing service and how it can help you and your business grow.
