Email marketing is a huge revenue driver for many businesses, boasting an ROI of $36 to $45 for every dollar spent on this channel. The metrics for email marketing are one of the reasons it’s so effective, allowing marketers to track how emails are resonating with audiences, what’s working, what isn’t working, and adapt accordingly.
While we could list out all of the metrics you should be tracking, instead, we thought it would be helpful to share the mistakes we see marketers make over and over again when analyzing their email campaigns. Learn from the mistakes others have made along the way and where you should be focusing your time instead.
The Open rate is the percentage of contacts that open your email out of the contacts that the email was sent to, and of course you want your contacts to open your emails. There are a few ways to optimize your open rates by testing your subject line, from name, send time, and preview text to set your email campaign up for success. But focusing too much on open rates is a mistake. Just because someone opens an email, doesn’t mean they’re engaging with the content, and if they’re not engaging, they’re not converting.
Plus, if you’re focusing only on open rates, it can lead you down a rabbit hole to spammy, click-bait tactics that don’t align with your content or brand. Trust us. That’s a sure-fire way to the spam folder.
Click-through rates are the percentage of users who click on a link within your email. This trusty metric is often a better indicator than open rates of the health of your email program because it tells you if people are actually engaging and interested in the content you’re sending.
Some marketers take click-through rates a step further and look at click-to-open rates (CTOR) or, of those that open the email, the percentage of people that click on a link.
While click-through rates are an important engagement metric, it is one part of the story and should be taken into consideration alongside other metrics, such as open rate, delivery rate, and unsubscribes.
Email deliverability measures how often your email is actually landing in your contact’s inbox. Without it, you end up in the spam folder, and when ignored for too long, it can hurt your sender reputation. When your sender reputation is damaged, stricter filtering is placed on your email sends, meaning that even fewer emails are getting through to recipients’ inboxes.
If you don’t remedy your sender reputation, your IP address could land on a block list, your account could be suspended by your email service provider, and then you’d be unable to send any emails through your account.
If you’re worrying about contacts unsubscribing, don’t (at least not too much). While unsubscribe rate is a good email marketing metric to monitor and should be checked on monthly, it is not the end all be all of your email program. In fact, unsubscribes are a good thing. Yup, you read that right.
An unsubscribe tells you that someone is no longer interested in your content, and while it may sting at first, it’s much better to have a contact list of highly-engaged, interested recipients than contacts that rarely open your emails. Plus, someone choosing to unsubscribe is a much healthier option for your email program than spam complaints.
Spam complaints, on the other hand, should be high on your worry-list. Spam complaints can damage your sender reputation and affect how many of your emails end up in the spam folder as opposed to the primary inbox.
If you’re receiving multiple spam complaints, this could mean:
It’s challenging to unsubscribe: Do you not have an unsubscribe option or is it challenging to find? While it may sound counterintuitive, you want to make it as easy as possible to unsubscribe. Making it easy to unsubscribe ensures that your audience is engaged and doesn’t end up marking your email as spam.
Your content is irrelevant to your audience: Let’s say you're a shoe company and you send newsletters promoting your shoes and shoe care. If all of a sudden you change topics and start advertising barbecues, your audience is going to think the content is fishy and mark it as spam.
Your emails are unsolicited: Are you buying email lists and sending marketing emails without having your contacts opt-in? There are so many problems with purchasing email lists (honey pots, spam traps, unengaged contacts, to name a few). Having your contacts opt-in is the best way to ensure that your contact base is engaged and truly wants to receive your emails.
When it comes down to brass tax, the point of email marketing is to increase conversions and drive revenue for your business. Sure, an engaged audience is a big part of email marketing success, but ultimately, you need to be tracking conversions and ROI to ensure that the time, effort, and money you’re putting into your email marketing program is worth your while.
To calculate conversion metrics, first define your conversion metric. It could be downloading a guide, purchasing a product, or signing up for a free trial. Review your click-through metrics and track through Google Analytics where users go once they reach your site.
For ROI, tally your email marketing costs. This includes not only the cost of the program but the cost of the time required to set up, create, and send email campaigns.
Then, calculate your total revenue from email marketing. Track sales or leads generated from email clicks using UTM parameters or coupon codes specific to your email campaign.
Use the ROI formula: ROI = (Total Revenue from Email Marketing - Total Costs) / Total Costs x 100
The biggest mistake marketers make when reviewing email marketing metrics is not looking at the whole picture. With the sheer quantity of metrics for email marketing (many of which we didn’t cover here), it’s easy to deep dive and get lost in the nitty gritty details. But to really measure the health of your email program, you have to take a step back and look at several key metrics as a whole.
This bird’s eye view will help you identify what truly needs your attention and where you can optimize your campaigns. For more information on email metrics, check out our guide, The Complete Email Metrics Guide (With Formulas).
