When you start using email marketing to promote your goods and services, open rates and click-through rates will be your main metrics. Over time though you will realise that you need to know more in order to measure the success of your campaigns.
Even the most basic email programs provide open and click-through rates metrics but the more advanced platforms like HubSpot, provide access to more significant post-click metrics, such as bounce rate, downloads, page impressions, unsubscribe rate, delivery rate, list growth rate, sales conversions and more.
Before looking at metrics you need to know what you want to achieve from your campaign. What are your goals, KPIs? Below I’ve listed just three metrics:
Converting leads to engaged clients
If the goal of an email campaign is to persuade leads to complete a purchase and eventually become clients, the email’s call-to-action ought to be concentrated on the product or service offering. In this case, the lead-to-customer conversion rate is the metric to track. If the goal is for customers to make a purchase, and 90% of recipients open the email, or click on the offering, but don’t make a purchase, the campaign has not been successful.
New or total leads generated
If the goal is generating leads, your content should focus on that. You can offer incentives to convince subscribers to submit a lead capture form. When building your form, you should make sure that you only request information that is necessary and will be most helpful in the lead nurturing process.
The amount of information you are asking for should align with what the recipient will get back in return. Only ask for what you need, and what\’s relevant for that campaign. This will maximise not just the quantity, but also the quality of leads generated.
Growing your subscriber list
One of the main focuses of email campaigns is to increase brand awareness, bring visitors to the website and grow email subscriber lists. For these emails, the focus should be on the call-to-action that encourages these particular behaviours. That said, the growth rate for the subscriber list is likely the most important metric to examine when determining achievement.
As mentioned above email open rates may be one of the first things you want to measure but it is an unreliable email marketing metric. An email is only counted as open if the recipient also receives the images embedded in the message. If recipients have image blocking on and open the email, this action won’t be included in your open rate.
You can, however, use the open rate as a comparative metric by comparing open rates from previous emails.
This is one of the biggest measurement drawbacks I’ve seen. If you use images in your marketing emails, this is a measurement you need to reconsider.
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