6 Vital Email Marketing Metrics & How to Use Them

By now, we all realise the importance of nurturing our prospects with valuable, educational and engaging content and email marketing plays a huge part in enabling us to do that.

However, it’s no use sending out email campaigns if we are not measuring their success.

Having the ability to measure the success of your email campaigns can help you to see the type of content your prospects are most engaged with and where you need to make improvements.

Email marketing metrics are therefore extremely important but can be confusing. So, in this blog, we’re going to talk you through the vital email marketing metrics you should know about and how to use them.

It’s worth noting that these metrics are available to you in the InTouch system but this information can also be applied to other email marketing providers.

1. Open Rate

Definition: The open rate of an email campaign is a measure of how many recipients have opened your email.

This is of course one of the most important email marketing metrics because it gives you a good indication of whether your recipients are interested in your content initially.

Good open rates rely on several factors and usually means that your subject line has grabbed your audience’s attention and enticed them enough to open your email. Therefore, perfecting your subject line is hugely important. If you’re looking to improve your open rates, click here for an article on how you can do that.

“But, what is a good open rate?” I hear you ask. Again, there are various factors to take into consideration here. However, put simply, the average open rate is around 25%. Below is a set of data from GetResponse of numerous different industries and their average open rate, to give you a more accurate benchmark for your industry.

Email marketing providers, including InTouch, provides you with this metric as well as allowing you to see exactly who opened your email. This means you can see who is the most engaged and target them with a different approach. InTouch also allows you to see what time of day recipients opened your email. With this information, you can determine the best time to communicate with your customers for maximum success.

2. Click-through Rate (CTR)

Definition: The click-through rate is how many times your recipient has clicked a link in your email.

The next of our 6 vital email marketing metrics is quite straightforward. If you include a URL in your email, you’ll be able to see how many times it has been clicked. This could be a call-to-action button or a link to a product, for example.

Knowing this metric shows you whether your email is enough to encourage your recipients to actually act on your email. Like the open-rates of your emails, with InTouch you can see which recipients have clicked on which links, indicating which products they are most interested in.

Column 2 of the graph above, again shows you the average click-through rate of various industries. The average click-through rate is, unsurprisingly lower than the average open rate, at around 4%.

There are techniques you can try to improve your click-through rates, like ensuring your emails are responsive, making your CTA more prominent and easier to click or simply making improvements to your content.

3. Unsubscribe Rate

Definition: The unsubscribe rate of an email campaign is determined by the number of people that have unsubscribed from your email list.

If somebody unsubscribes to your email, you cannot continue to communicate with them. A high unsubscribe rate is usually seen as negative because it means that those people are no longer interested in your offering. However, Neil Patel explains here, why it’s a good thing. Your email list should be about quality, not quantity. You want the people you are spending time and money on communicating with to potentially convert into a sale. So if they’re not interested and never will be interested, your simply wasting your time.

4. Hard Bounce

Definition: A hard bounce is an email that couldn’t be delivered, usually because the recipient’s email address is invalid or incorrect.

Bounces are a common occurrence in email marketing and can happen for various reasons. Think of a bounced email as a ball you throw to someone- the ball bounces off a wall and comes back to you rather than reaching the person.

Hard bounces most commonly occur if your recipient has changed jobs and therefore their email address has been deleted.

In InTouch, if a hard bounce occurs, the contact will be automatically added to the sender’s suppression list. This means that you will not be able to send them further emails. A similar process will be followed by other email marketing providers. This helps to keep your email list clean and free from outdated email addresses.

5. Soft Bounce

Definition: A soft bounce is an email that couldn’t be delivered due to reasons that are temporary.

Soft bounces may occur if the recipients email is too full, their server is down or the message you’re trying to send it too large.

InTouch and other email marketing providers will continue to attempt to deliver your email but if the soft bounce continues, it will change to a hard bounce and the recipient will be added to your suppression list.

It’s important to keep an eye on this email marketing metric because as it can begin to affect your reputation as a sender.

6. Complaint Rate

Definition: The complaint rate is how many recipients have reported your email as spam.

Even legitimate email senders get a few spam complaints every now and then. If you’re a legitimate sender, here are a few ways to prevent complaints:

Get permission

With the recent introduction of GDPR, you absolutely must have permission to communicate with your contacts.

Make your unsubscribe link obvious

Spammers often hide the unsubscribe link, making it impossible for recipients to opt out of their emails. Make it easy for your recipients to unsubscribe to your emails if they want to.

Communicate regularly

By communicating regularly with your contacts, they won’t forget that they gave you permission to contact them. However, if for some reason you don’t contact them for 2 years and suddenly start communicating with them, there’s a chance that they’ll have forgotten about you and mark your email as spam.

Don’t over-communicate

Your recipients will not appreciate being bombarded with emails so ensure that you don’t email them too often.

So, there’s 6 important email marketing metrics explained. These metrics are available to you in your InTouch account, under the email reporting tab. Having access to these figures and running regular reports is key to be able to make improvements to your email campaigns and in turn, increase your sales.

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