10 Email Marketing Metrics You Must Track | With Formulas
With its less cost and high impact, email marketing has not lost its shine. If you do not intend to disturb your customers and leads with annoying calls and dry SMS, email marketing is the way to go. With internet and smartphone penetration on the rise, access to the inbox has never been so easy. Email marketing is vital to maintain a personal bond with your customers. It is also important for lead generation, lead nurturing, conversion and loyalty.
Here are the email marketing metrics you must track to be successful in your marketing efforts using emails.
Sender reputation
Before you send mass emails, you must make sure that you have a good sender reputation. In the online world, it's not you who sends the email but the domain. Your domain has an associated IP address. An IP address is a number that is attached to your domain. Since your domain’s IP address can be changed easily, sender reputation implies domain reputation.
Domain reputation is a score calculated out of 100 by mailbox providers such as Gmail. Positive engagement with your emails by the users will boost your domain’s reputation.
Email Delivery Rate
Now that you have maintained a good domain reputation, you can start sending out mass emails. Email delivery rate is the percentage of emails you sent that were delivered to the user.
Email delivery rate answers the question, How many emails were delivered to the user for every 100 emails sent?
A low email delivery rate is an indication of a bad list hygiene and domain reputation.
Inbox Placement Rate
Emails could to delivered to the inbox or to the spam folder. You can not truly say that your emails were delivered to the user unless it is delivered to the inbox. Inbox placement rate is the percentage of emails you sent that was delivered specifically to the inbox.
Inbox placement rate answers the question, How many emails were delivered to the inbox for every 100 emails sent?
A low inbox placement rate is an indication of bad domain reputation.
Unfortunately, this important metric cannot be tracked. But you can perform internal experiments within your organization to determine the inbox placement rate.
Bounce rate
Why were some emails not delivered? What happened to them?
An undelivered email is considered to be a bounce.
Bounce rate answers the question, How many emails were not delivered for every 100 emails sent?
Bounce is categorized into 2 types:
Hard Bounce
A hard bounce occurs due to permanent reasons such as an invalid email address. Hard bounce rate is the percentage of emails you sent that resulted in a hard bounce.
Soft Bounce
A soft bounce occurs due to temporary reasons such as a completely filled inbox. Soft bounce rate is the percentage of emails you sent that resulted in a soft bounce.
Open Rate
Now that your emails are delivered, it’s time to check how effective your email’s subject line and preview text were. Open rate is the percentage of emails that were opened.
Open rate answers the question, How many emails were opened for every 100 emails delivered?
Click to Open rate
Now that your emails are opened, it’s time to check how effective your email’s body was in generating action from the user. Click to Open rate is the percentage of emails that were opened and clicked too. It is important to note that only unique clicks and unique opens are considered.
Click to Open rate answers the question, How many unique clicks were received for every 100 unique opens?
Click to Open rate is also known as Adjusted Click Through rate.
Spam Complaint Rate
It is important to understand the fact that it’s humans who read your emails. So, proper list segmentation is necessary to send relevant emails. If your emails are irrelevant, your users will report your email as spam.
Spam complaint rate helps you assess the quality of your list segmentation.
Spam complaint rate answers the question, How many spam complaints were registered for every 100 emails delivered?
A higher spam complaint rate will negatively impact the domain’s reputation.
Unsubscribe Rate
If your emails are irrelevant and of high frequency, users will consider unsubscribing from your email list. Email frequency depends on the product and the customer segment.
It answers the question, How many unsubscribed from the email list for every 100 emails delivered?
Email list churn rate
Now it’s time to assess the impact your email marketing efforts had on your precious email list.
Email list churn rate is the percentage of users in the list who either unsubscribed or were invalid.
It answers the question, How many emails addresses are useless for every 100 emails addresses in the email list.
You have to make sure that unsubscribed emails are removed from the list. It is also important to remove emails addresses that hard bounced since a hard bounce can negatively impact the domain reputation.
Conversion Rate
It is now time to assess how successful your email marketing efforts were in generating conversions. Conversion is an action that you want your users to perform on your website. It can be a purchase, lead generation etc.,
To track conversions, it is important to add UTM tags in the URL that you want the user to click in the email. Analytics tools on the website will attribute the conversion based on those UTM tags.
It answers the question, How many users converted for every 100 emails delivered?
Management thinker Peter Drucker said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”
Understanding of the email marketing metrics will help you create highly effective and engaging email marketing campaigns.
