Email Marketing 101: Metrics vs. Data

October 31, 2012 | by | Category:

What to Measure: The Data

Before you start measuring the success of your email campaigns, you first must know what data to collect.

Email Marketing Metrics

Messages Sent - This is the number of outbound emails sent.

Messages Delivered - This is the number of sent emails actually delivered to you recipients’ inbox.

Hard and Soft Bounces - A hard bounce is a permanently undeliverable email — for example, one sent to an invalid email address or to an address that no longer exists. A soft bounce is an email that is only temporarily undeliverable — for example, to a recipient whose mailbox is full. Ideally, you should track both.

Messages Opened - This is the number of recipients who open your email.

Unique and Total Clicks - This is the number of times any recipient clicks on a trackable link within the email. You want to track both unique and total links because some of your recipients might click on the same link multiple times.

Unsubscribes - This is the number of individuals who unsubscribe from your list in response to each mailing sent.

Making Sense of The Data: The Metrics

What are the useful metrics and what can they tell you? Here are the four metrics will help you understand the success of your email marketing campaigns.

1. Open Rates

Open Rate determines what percentage of recipients opened your email. To calculate Open Rate, divide the number of messages opened by the number of messages delivered:

The Open Rate measures the recipients’ interest in the From and Subject lines of your email. These two fields have one job — convince recipients to open your email. Opens are measured by a small transparent HTML image that is loaded in the email when the recipient accepts to download images to ‘view’ the content.

This means that the Open Rate is a questionable metric but it can still be a useful way to compare the success of one subject line to another. Open Rate shouldn’t be considered a measure of who’s actually read your email.

To improve your Open Rate:

  • Write a killer subject line. Think about what subject lines make you open an email in your own inbox – you could ask a question, promote a sense of urgency, personalize the subject line, and of course, use proper grammar and spelling.
  • Test your subject lines. Test if your subject is catchy or spammy. Create an A/B test for your next email send. A/B testing allow you to send different versions of your email to different segments of your list, and compare the results.
  • Personalize the Sender. Instead of sending your email from sales@company.com have the sender profile reflect who the actual person is that is sending the email.

2. Click-Through Rates

The second key metric is Click-Through Rate (CTR). CTR is the number of click-throughs divided by the number of messages delivered.

The CTR tells you both how interested recipients were in your email message, and how well you converted that interest into click-throughs.

Click-Through-Rates ranges can drastically depending who are the recipients of your email. When you send emails to your house list, you can expect dramatically higher conversion rates than sending an email to a new list from a tradeshow because your house list already has received several emails from you and knows what to expect from your emails.

To improve your Click-Through Rate:

  • Make content and descriptions compelling. Provide recipients something they really want to click to see, and a description that makes it clear why they should.
  • Align your subject line with your content. Readers are more likely to click through when their expectations are aligned. The subject line should match the email content to so they feel like they know what to expect when they also click through the email.
  • Test the design of your email. The format of an email, can have a dramatic effect on your CTR. For example, you can test a link versus a buttons, a bold headline versus a image header, or various images.

3. Response Rate/Conversion Rate

The third key metric to understand is the Response Rate. Response Rate is the number of desired actions, divided by the number of messages delivered:

The Response Rate is the best way to measure the effectiveness of an email campaign. It tells you how engaged your recipient is with the content that you sent. The rate will depend a great deal on what action you’re requesting.

To improve your Response Rate:

  • Provide a compelling reason to act. The way you frame your call to action has a huge impact on the response rate.
  • Optimize your landing page. For example, add a compelling image, remove the distraction of navigation bars and minimize the number of links on the page. This can substantially improve your response rate by helping your visitor focus on one action only.
  • Create a sense of urgency. Limit your offers to focus your recipients on acting on your call to action quickly.

4. Unsubscribe Rate

The last key item to track is the Unsubscribe Rate. The Unsubscribe Rate is the number of unsubscribes divided by the number of messages delivered.

Use the Unsubscribe Rate to measure how well you hold your subscribers’ interest over time. If subscribers don’t like what you’re saying or don’t find it interesting, they’ll let you know by leaving your email list.

To reduce your Unsubscribe Rate:

  • Provide value every time. Are you sending emails that provide value to the recipient rather than soley serving your own needs? Just because people trust you with their emails doesn’t mean you should spam them.
  • Manage your volume of email. If you’re sending emails more than every couple of weeks and seeing a high Unsubscribe Rate, you might want to consider decreasing the volume. If your desired Response Rate of your emails is high, you might let those who are less interested unsubscribe, or to try to decrease the volume of emails for those who aren’t as active.
  • Segment your recipient list. Segment your marketing contacts so that you can also customize your messaging to align closely with what your recipients are interested in.
  • Allow unsubscribes by type. Provide recipients with an opportunity to unsubscribe from a particular type of email instead of opting out of all email from you. A subscriber might appreciate your monthly newsletter, but be put off by your daily blog post.