Marketers are obsessed with metrics. They provide key information to help us improve our marketing efforts, and a lot of entertainment; a Friday night with a bag of popcorn, cold beverage, and some fresh analytics reports sounds like a great night indeed.
It is, however, important to focus on the right (or best for a given situation) metrics – and talking about email marketing, it’s important to not measure success on one metric alone.
Different goals call for different metrics. What is the focus of your email campaigns? Is it a product recall announcement, brand-building newsletter, order reminder, special promotion, announcement of a new store? Each of these would prioritize a different set of metrics.
For the product recall example, you’re probably not concerned that your sale conversion rate is near non-existent, but do want to make sure the message was opened and read. For your big email promotion email, it does not matter much if everyone opened the email, but no one made a purchase.
Below is a starter list of email marketing metrics:
1. Open Rate: [ratio of unique opens to total delivered] Don’t get too caught up here. Some companies base their entire success on the open rate. Do monitor this metric for every send, but don’t make it the only metric you monitor.
2. CTR (Click Through Rate): [ratio of unique clicks to total delivered or unique opens] The CTR can be helpful, especially when you have different links and you monitor the CTR for each. Knowing that your ‘Basketball Shoes’ link had a CTR of 39% while your ‘Soccer Shoes’ was 10% can be helpful.
3. Conversion Rate: [ratio of a 'goal' conversion to the total click through, or opens] If you are an e-commerce site, the conversion rate from your email initiatives is pretty important. In this case, the percent of visitors from the email that made a purchase. If you find that Promotion/Campaign X converts at 10% while another at 1%, you have some valuable data to work with.
4. Campaign Revenue: In addition to the previous metric, how much revenue did a campaign (or group of campaigns) bring in? This of course can be monitored for different email sends, or based on time to see how much money the email channel brings by month, quarter etc.
5. Bounce Rate: [ratio of bounced emails to total sent] This metric is universal no matter what the goals of your campaign are. Increasing bounce rate = look into the issue quickly. While not really as sexy as the conversion rate or total revenue, it is very important and will affect other metrics.
6. Delivery Rate: [ratio of delivered emails to total sent] See comments from Bounce Rate — the same apply, but here: decreasing delivery rate = look into the issue quickly.
7. Opt-Out (or Unsubscribe) Rate:[ratio of opt-outs to total delivered] Clearly we want to keep this one low. We will inevitably have some occurrences of subscribers no longer wanting our emails, but we need to monitor this metric to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand.
8. Link Revenue: Going off of our campaign revenue, let’s dig a little deeper and see how much money each specific link in our email is generating.
9. Time-Delay Metrics: What percent of our opens, or clicks, conversion etc occur on the day the email was sent? Within 3 days? Within 7 days? 2-4 weeks? On a somewhat related note, when providing reports to clients, we like to do so in delay, to account for that delayed engagement.
As mentioned at the beginning of this post, some metrics won’t be a priority for all emails. It’s important to know what your goals are for a particular campaign and for your email channel at large. This will let you identify and prioritize your key performance indicators. This data will then allow you to make meaningful decisions and improvements to your email efforts.
In a future post, we will discuss the importance of creating your own historical benchmark guide.
