This article explains how to track the performance of your email marketing campaigns using various KPIs, and also discusses some non-campaign metrics.
When tracking email KPIs and metrics, it's important to ensure they align with your campaign goals.
For example, if an email campaign is only intended to raise awareness and no action is required, open rates can be a satisfactory metric for monitoring performance, but they are flawed.
If it's a new product announcement with a call to action asking readers to click on a landing page and buy your product, your KPIs should reflect conversions such as sales or gross revenue.
KPIs can be measured by indicators that can be divided into four categories:
- activity metrics (also known as engagement metrics);
- objective indicators,
- business indicators,
- Inbox performance metrics.
1. Email activity metrics
These are the metrics most frequently reported by marketers. These are usually easily available through reports sent during and after the campaign. Although these are primarily used as metrics, they may not reflect your campaign goals and may require metrics that are not available in basic reporting from your email platform. And there's no more useful insight into campaign performance, customer preferences, or other data than opening and clicking.
Some of the email activity metrics are:
1a. Email click-through rate (CTR)
This is calculated by dividing the number of unique clicks on links within an email (one click per email address) by the number of emails delivered, then multiplying by 100 to get the percentage. . What is considered high depends on several variables, including sector, quality of targeting, quality of copy, and quality of call to action. Marketers need to measure their CTR over time to isolate, evaluate, and optimize the impact of these different factors.
1b. Unique open rate
This is calculated by dividing the number of unique opens for emails (one open per email address) by the number of emails delivered and multiplying by 100 to get the percentage. This KPI helps you measure the quality of your targeting and subject lines. It is not an indication of the quality or call to action of the email content. This is where metrics like CTR come in handy.
1c. Click-to-open rate (CTOR)
Click-to-open rate is measured as the ratio of unique clicks to unique opens, so it is more useful than standard click-through or open rates in measuring the effectiveness of your email content. Effectively, this means marketers can determine how many recipients who read an email were interested enough to click through and complete an action. To measure, divide unique clicks by unique opens and multiply by 100.
1d.Response rate
Response rate refers to the number of actions that occur as a result of an email campaign, expressed as a percentage of the total amount of emails sent, regardless of reception rate.
1e. Unsubscribe (opt-out) rate
“Unsubscribe” refers to both a Subscriber's request to be removed from an email list and the act of removal. Your email list opt-out rate is influenced by the quantity, quality, and relevance of emails you receive, so it's important to track this metric over time. If you suddenly see a sudden spike in unsubscribes, it could be a sign that your marketing message isn't being well received.
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It's natural to see some turnover in your email list. What constitutes a “good” unsubscribe rate varies by industry, but overall an unsubscribe rate of 0.5% or less is considered normal, and less than 0.2% is good.
1f.Unsubscribe rate open rate
Another useful metric to measure is unsubscribe rate open rate. This measures the amount of list unsubscribes as a percentage of subscribed email opens. Therefore, it shows the churn rate of the recipients who opened the email.
1g.spam complaint rate
This represents the percentage of recipients who marked your message as spam or junk. This may be because they are confused about who the sender is and why they are receiving the email, or because they can't find the unsubscribe link, or because they simply think the email is spam.
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If a brand's email receives too many spam complaints, future emails from that company, even if they are addressed to the people who want to receive them, will be blocked by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). ) may be blocked or flagged.
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According to ActiveCampaign, an email marketing tools provider, the industry standard spam complaint tolerance rate is less than 0.1%, or one complaint for every 1,000 emails sent. Senders who incur higher fees may have a harder time reaching their subscribers' inboxes.
2. Objective indicators
These purpose-based metrics reflect campaign objectives for campaigns that aim to achieve more than awareness. These reflect subscriber activity, but go beyond the inbox level to measure whether the campaign achieved its objectives.
2a. Conversion
In e-commerce, the term “conversion” tends to relate to a completed sale, but in email marketing, a conversion refers to a completed action triggered by an email. Examples include subscribing to a newsletter, downloading a mobile application, downloading a white paper, completing a survey, etc. Therefore, conversion rate is simply the percentage of email recipients who complete the desired action triggered by the email.
2b. Return on Investment (ROI)
This is the ultimate indicator of marketing performance. However, this is not the only indicator of success. ROI can be generated at the campaign level or over time to determine a more general ROI number. Your email service provider (ESP) may offer tools that allow you to independently analyze your email's ROI.
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Broadly speaking, ROI is calculated by dividing campaign revenue by investment cost. This requires defining:
- Conversions for campaign purposes. This includes completed transactions or other conversions such as filling out a form to speak to a sales consultant or downloading a whitepaper.
- Average monetary value of a conversion.
- Revenue generated by a campaign (defined as the number of recipients who converted multiplied by the value of each conversion).
- Investment cost to run a campaign.
3. Business metrics
Business metrics should measure the results of your e-commerce campaign and map to your campaign goals. They include:
- Campaign total revenue
- Revenue per email
- new lead
- average order size
- Difference between first-time purchase and repeat purchase
- customer lifetime value
To accurately measure these metrics, an ESP typically needs to be tightly integrated with an e-commerce or customer relationship management (CRM) system. You should also track over time, not just one campaign, to show trends. This allows marketers to optimize email and automation for campaigns and fix problem areas.
The integrated platform's systems enable automatic flow of data, allowing marketers to clearly assess campaign performance. Many ESPs and other platforms optimize their reporting using data visualization in graphs and charts rather than raw numbers.
4. Inbox performance metrics
Inbox performance metrics measure campaign performance at your ISP or mailbox provider, such as Outlook, Gmail, or AOL. These measure whether your campaigns are successfully reaching your subscribers' inboxes. (For strategies to optimize email deliverability, see Econsultancy's Email Marketing Best Practices: Optimization report.)
4a. Reach rate (acceptance rate)
Deliverability or acceptance rate refers to the percentage of emails that are successfully received by a subscriber's email server and do not bounce (return).
There are two main ways to measure deliverability.
- Deliverability of returned emails: This measures the amount of emails sent minus the number of bounces (both soft and hard – see below) received.
- Inbox arrangement: This measures the amount of email delivered to your inbox rather than your spam folder, and does not include undelivered email.
For example, 100% sent, 1.7% bounced (hard and soft) = 98.3% delivered. If 97% of these delivered emails are placed in the inbox and 3% are placed in the spam folder, the inbox placement rate is 97%.
Deliverability as a metric can reveal a lot about the quality of the data in your email address list and how those email addresses were originally obtained.
4b. Bounce rate
The inverse of deliverability rate is bounce rate, which calculates the percentage of emails sent that are not successfully delivered. Email bounces can be classified into two categories: hard and soft.
- A hard bounce occurs when the email address is incorrect or does not exist. These addresses should be removed from your list immediately. The derivative of this metric is the average hard bounce rate. In other words, divide the number of hard bounces by the number of emails delivered and multiply by 100 to get the percentage.
- Soft bounces indicate temporary delivery issues, such as a full inbox or a server going down. The derivative of this metric is the average soft bounce rate. In other words, divide the number of soft bounces by the number of emails delivered and multiply by 100 to get the percentage.
Metrics beyond email campaigns
Email campaigns can have a ripple effect on other channels to support efforts that exceed your immediate conversion goals. The following three of her metrics help marketers determine whether a brand's email campaigns are contributing to achieving these broader business goals.
site traffic
Emails are often opened on mobile devices, so recipients may open your message and then not visit your site on another device. Marketers should track the general increase in traffic after email delivery. Although this is not an exact measure of email performance, it can show how well your email campaign is driving traffic to your site, even if recipients don't open individual messages. .
growing list
It's important to actively try to increase the number of email subscribers. Otherwise, customers will naturally leave your target segment and your list will shrink. List growth can also be achieved by encouraging customers to sign up at the point of e-commerce transaction, through on-site sign-up widgets and social media campaigns, or through offline customer touch points such as in-store kiosks and printed materials. It happens.
Brand awareness and affinity
Email campaigns, triggered campaigns, and targeted campaigns are a great way to maintain brand awareness, especially if your customers haven't done business with you in a while. Even customers who are considered “emotionally unsubscribed” (i.e., inactive but not actually clicking unsubscribe) are likely to act as brand advocates or do business with you again in the future. there is.
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Customer reviews, employee profiles, information about using a brand's products, and other non-promotional content also build emotional connections and keep customers interested in your brand even when they're not actively in the market to buy. I can.
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While brand awareness and affinity are difficult to measure and are useful soft metrics for email marketing, the importance of email to brand awareness should not be underestimated.
