Email marketing continues to be a reliable and cost-effective way for a business to promote, sell and generate sales leads online and offline. Successful marketers still run email marketing campaigns for a host of reasons. In fact, you can use email marketing to foster and grow your customer relationships as well as maintain a high level of customer satisfaction.
But, like other forms of marketing, in order to maximize your email marketing results, you should have a basic understanding of the metrics (obtained results) associated with your promotions.
Here’s 5 metrics that will show you how you can do just that.
FREE REPORT: Write emails that get opened (& how often to send them)
5 Important Metrics That Affect Your Email Marketing Results
Open Rate
Your open rate is simply the percentage of emails sent that were opened by your recipients. There are two ways to tell whether an email has been opened and read:
- You can request a return receipt
- Use an email tracking tool
The first way to discover if a recipient has opened your email, is by you requesting a return receipt through your email service provider. Outlook provides two different options for requesting a return receipt. If you decide to use the return receipt feature in Outlook, click Options on the Main Menu as you’re composing your message. A sub-menu with various options appears.
- Receipt when delivered
- Receipt when read
The free version of Gmail does not include the return receipt feature. However, the feature is available through GSuite. To use the return receipt feature in GSuite Gmail, you first must enable it.
To activate the return receipt feature, go your GSuite Admin Console. Select Apps > GSuite > Settings for Gmail > Advanced settings. Use the scroll bar on the right of the screen to scroll down to the Email Read Receipts option.
Click the toggle button to the left of allow email read receipts to be sent to all addresses in my organization as well as the following email addresses. When this option is turned on, users in your organization can request and return email receipts.
Click-To-Open Rate
You can calculate your click through rate on email marketing by dividing the number of people clicking (opening) your messages by the number of emails delivered. This figure will reveal whether:
- Your creative content is engaging
- The call-to-action is effective
- Your email is easy to understand and respond to.
Unsubscribe Rate
Are the unsubscribes due to the frequency, or poor messaging, or ineffective offers? If you see a spike in unsubscribes, analyze what (if anything) was different between campaigns that may have caused the increase. Remember that if one of your subscribers decides that they no longer want to receive emails from you, allow them to easily unsubscribe. If you make it difficult, they will start to resent your emails and certainly will never buy from you. They may also report you as spam, which will cause you problems in the future.
Rate of Conversions
One of the main objectives (if not the most important) of eCommerce email marketing is to get shoppers to your website and to purchase your products and services. Your conversion rate can be calculated by dividing the number of conversions, i.e. sales, or sales leads by the number of emails either delivered, opened, or clicked.
Revenue Per Email or Click
This metric (system of measurement) divides the revenue from an email by either the number of opens, or clicks. It also provides insight into how optimized your email was in generating revenue. The higher the revenue per open or click, the more effective was the email and your offer. It can also highlight optimal sending times.
Free Course: How To Boost Your Email Marketing Results (+ 45 Promotional Email Examples)
By understanding and applying these five metrics, you will gain valuable information on whether to improve your email marketing results or to maintain the status quo. When you’re fighting for attention in a busy inbox, you have to make sure that your message not only stands out, but gets read and some action is taken.
For more tips on improving your email marketing conversion rates, take a look at this free email marketing course that gives you all the tools you need to write emails like an expert. Plus you’ll get more than 45 free ‘fill-in-the-blanks’ copy templates to use for automated emails, survey emails, sale emails and more.
