If you’re not paying attention to your email metrics, you won’t have any idea how well your emails are actually performing.
There’s a myth out there in marketing land that it’s so easy to run an email marketing campaign, right? You just load it up in your autoresponders, and the emails go out on schedule and you get passive income. Easy peasy.
Not so much.
If you never check your email metrics or know what your numbers are, how do you know whether or not your content is even producing the desired results? What if it’s causing people to completely ignore your messages, or worse unsubscribe en masse? These are things you need to keep an eye on. Email marketing is not a “set and forget” thing.
Here are 5 key email metrics you should be keeping an eye on:
It doesn’t matter whether you’re emailing your daily newsletter or a specific marketing campaign, these are the numbers you need to know.
Metric #1 – Email Delivery or Bounce Rate
This is the rate at which your emails are delivered to your customers and make it to their email box. You want to keep track of this to ensure you have corrected and updated information on your leads and that your internet service provider is safe and secure to prevent rejection. This can be improved by using double-opt-in forms and authenticating your email address.
Metric #2 – Open Rate
The Open Rate indicates how often your subscribers are opening your emails. An open rate of twenty percent or higher is a vital goal to maintain, since you will have a hard time reaching your goals if people don’t open your messages. Just as an example, my open rate for my daily newsletter is averaging around 30% right now.
Metric #3 – Click-Through Rate
If you’re expecting to make money with your email marketing, then the click-through rate is one of the most important email metrics that you need to know.
Click-through rate or CTR indicates that your subscribers are clicking the links or call-to-actions within the email copy after opening it. A good goal to aim for here is a CTR of four percent or higher. You can improve your CTR by enhancing the copy and call-to-action.
One caveat here is to make sure you know what the CTR your autoresponder company gives you actually represents. They most often give you a CTR of clicks to emails sent, which is okay as an overall picture, but the next one I’m going to share is the one you really want to keep track of.
Metric #4 – Click-To-Open Rate
This is my favorite email metric to keep track of because it gives you a much clearer picture of how your content is performing, and how relevant your offers are. It’s also one that a lot of people don’t talk about.
The click-to-open rate measures the number of unique clicks by the number of unique opens to determine how unique or interesting your content is to your subscribers. This metric can vary and should be around twenty to thirty percent, if not higher, if you truly know your audience and develop amazing content.
Metric #5 – Unsubscribe Rate
This rate shows how many people have unsubscribed or removed themselves from your email campaign. I keep an eye on this, but I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to it unless a lot of people mass unsubscribe from a particular email.
Some of the reasons your unsubscribe rate can be high are:
- You send too many emails
- You don’t email often enough and they’ve forgotten who you are
- The content is not relevant
- The content is not well-written
I could go on here… but the one reason that no one mentions, especially if you are building your list from events, is that you are going to get people opting in to receive your freebie, and then leaving right away again. So always keep that in mind when you’re looking at larger then normal unsub rates.
The bottom line is though, you can glean a lot of really good information from these key email metrics if you pay attention to them. And if you take action on what you learn you can become really successful at email marketing.
