What is Email Marketing all About? 📩
Emailing marketing isn’t just about sending multiple emails daily and hoping for the best. It involves tracking and measuring results of those emails to inform data-driven decisions for future sends. These decisions are often adopted to project key performance indicators (KPIs). Therefore allowing a busines to reach relevant goals required for business growth.
Providing clear KPIs can create a clean picture of how well your email campaigns are performing. Metrics such as open rates, click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, and bounce rates help assess the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts.
Tracking KPIs allows businesses to identify what works and what doesn’t. This data can inform decisions about subject lines, content, design, and sending time. Email marketing can be one of the most cost-effective marketing channels. Measuring KPIs helps in calculating the return on investment (ROI) of email campaigns, making it easier for businesses to allocate resources.
Understanding how user behaviors correlate with engagement metrics can help improve retention strategies, ensuring that subscribers remain engaged over time.
Let’s dive into why tracking your marketing campaigns matters and the 5 most important metrics to adopt before creating your business goals.
How to Choose your Company's Success Metrics!
Choosing your company's KPIs isn’t as straightforward as checking how many people have opened your email. The metrics depend on your overall marketing goals and the type of content you want to get across to your target audience.
Finding the right email marketing goals is essential to measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns and making informed decisions for future marketing strategies. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you define your goals for those relevant metrics. Start by identifying what you want to achieve with your email marketing campaigns. Common goals include:
Increasing Brand Awareness: Focusing on metrics that can increase your brand awareness such as open rates and social shares.
Generating Leads: Gaining relevant details such as a consumer's name, phone number and personal preferences allows a company the prospect of turning new customers into future buyers. Therefore generating leads and increasing conversion rates.
Driving Sales: Looking at revenue per email, previous order history, and click-through rates (CTR) to see where marketing effort is paying off.
Enhancing Customer Engagement: Analyze your click-through rates (CTR), reply rates, and list growth rate.
Understanding the 5 Most Important Key Metrics for your Email Campaigns! 💡
✔️ Open Rates
Open rates tell us the key information that we need to know about our email campaign. This tells us how many recipients have viewed your emails. How else would we know if the customers opened it if they don’t take action! An easy way to calculate the success rate is by doing the following:
✬ Sent emails = 1,000
✬ Bounced emails = 100
✬ Delivered emails = 900
✬ Opened emails = 35
Then, your open rate would be as follows:
Opened emails / delivered emails * 100 = 35 / 900 * 100 = 3.88%
The higher the open rate means the better your emails are looking in your customers inbox. You can chop and change simple things such as subjects that intrigue your consumer as to what is inside of your email.
But what if the opening metric is not as strong as we’d initially hoped? The best way to improve open rates is to look at how the outside is looking prior to sending. Review your subject lines and email pretexts as those would be the first things that your customer views. If this fails, you can resend the email to recipients that did not open it.
This can usually be created as a ‘subgroup’ within email marketing platforms. You can click into the email and view the fall out. Therefore, creating a new mailing group to those who did not open it. This way you can increase your open rate from 35 to 150. Meaning the overall success of that email was actually 15%.
However, some marketers state that open rates are not the most critical part when ranking prioritized metrics. Others think that click-through rate (CTR) is the most effective in regards to accuracy.
✔️ Click-Through Rates (CTR)
This metric informs companies of the percentage of consumers that have clicked onto at least one existing link within your email. It allows you to understand how many people have clicked into your email and taken action by viewing further content, showing that it sparked their interest. This is why there is a divide between marketers who prefer to track click-through rates (CTR) over open rates. Overall, the end goal is for your customer to interact with the email sent, rather than just brushing over the information.
The higher the click-through rate (CTR), the better you understand your customer and that content they want to see. It’s a clear indicator that your offers/services are aligning with consumers needs.
However, if the click-through rate (CTR) is not at the level you’d expect, you can introduce A/B testing. This is where you experiment with two separate emails, changing images, pretexts and content to see which one performs better. This way you can adopt this into your practice.
✔️ Unsubscribe Rates
Not all of your business metrics have to be high in performance. Some KPIs are just as important when you keep them as low as possible. This relates to the unsubscribe rate, also known as the fall-out rate. This is the percentage of customers who opt out from receiving future correspondents from you.
Some companies choose to ignore this but it is just as important as all of the other metrics. After obtaining the database, it is often forgotten about how a business is to sustain them. A few reasons as to why a customer might want to opt out of emails are as followed:
✬ The customer no longer requires the service/product that your company are offering. If this is the case, there is no correct way to win them back.
✬ When they no longer find your emails to be enticing or valuable to them. In this instance, you can try to rethink your current marketing strategy and apply A/B testing to see what is more desired by your customer base.
A lot of customers don’t actively unsubscribe to your email marketing. Often, they stop engaging when they have no further interest in your services/products.
Sadly, due to compliance guidelines you cannot force your customers to stay. Within every email chain, you must link an unsubscribe button/link for your customers so they have the choice to opt out otherwise there could be legal consequences for your establishment.
✔️ Bounce Rates
We previously mentioned bounce rates in our first metric of open rates. Just like unsubscribe rates, bounce rates are something that you need to keep low and always in mind.
This is a percentage of emails that emailing services bounce back to the sender. This could be due to a few reasons such as an issue with the recipient's email address or the emailing service cannot deliver due to sending error. To go more in depth, here are different types of bounce rates:
✬ Soft bounces: This can happen when there is a server issue, unavailability of the recipients inbox or there inbox is full. This type of bounce back is nothing too worrying to act upon. With this, you would just need to monitor and try again at a later time.
✬ Hard bounces: These can occur when the domain is unavailable, invalid email address or the server has refused to accept emails outside of a certain domain. This type of bounce back means that it is best to remove the email address from your mailing list.
A repeated offense of high bounce rates can damage your email against service providers. This can result in your emails landing in spam folders, affecting your company's deliverability. This typically happens when a number of customers mark your email as spam in their emails and it will flag in the emailing providers system.
✔️ Delivery Rates
What is the opposite of bounce rates? Delivery rates! It tells you the exact percentage of emails that have successfully landed in your recipient’s inbox.
The delivery rate goes over multiple hurdles to land safely in your customers inbox. This is one of your key indicators that should be performing highly, to indicate your email marketing campaigns are going to produce high results. However, what causes low delivery rates and can we control those factors within our company’s? Here are a few factors that could affect this:
✬ Invalid Email Addresses: Your emails will not deliver to an inbox if the email does not exist. Therefore it is always important to review subscription emails for spelling errors to increase the chances of higher delivery rates.
✬ Email Protocols: Protocols such as DKIM and SPF help to verify that your addresses are legitimate. If there are issues with this, it will affect your delivery rates.
✬ Emailing too Frequently: Who would have thought emailing too often can contribute to this problem! Sending too many emails too often will re-link to spam folders. Email service providers redirect your emails into spam folders if they’re sent too often, therefore make sure you send emails 1-2 times a week. Doing this will help keep your delivery percentages high!
Let’s put it into Practice!
Something to take away from this is that setting KPIs will not grow your audience, however analyzing those numbers will help your company learn and revise your strategy. After continuously revising your email strategy, you will then start to see growth.
At kyco, we are constantly monitoring our clients performance, growth and exposure. If you want help setting up your company for success then we know just the thing. We can help you set and manage realistic KPIs for your company’s campaigns whilst gathering contacts, growing your database and retaining customers at each hurdle.
