The money is in the list… it’s a phrase that is almost always mentioned whenever the subject of email marketing comes up, and for good reason. After all, a mailing list can be one of the most valuable marketing assets that a business can use to drive sales.
But, if you aren’t making efforts to monitor your email metrics, then you won’t be able to get the true value from your all-valuable mailing list.
For that reason, we have gathered together the top 11 email metrics that you might want to consider when conducting your next marketing campaign. Because each email marketing campaign is different, the measurement of some of these metrics will better apply to some campaigns than others.
For that reason, we suggest that you choose one or two of these email metrics that you feel are the most important to your marketing campaign and focus on measuring them. That way you will be better equipped to identify leading indicators early on and take your metrics from good to great.
1. Open Rate
By tracking this key performance indicator the effectiveness of the subject line copy can easily be determined and it’s easy to see if an average open rate was reached.
2. Click-through Rate (CTR)
CTR is another important KPI to consider when measuring the effectiveness of a campaign. Sure, recipients might have opted to open the message, but if they aren’t clicking on the links inside, then it’s pretty clear that the campaign wasn’t a success. Therefore, by tracking this metric, we can learn if a campaign has managed to achieve an average CTR.
3. Conversion Rate
Conversation rate builds on CTR by tracking just how many of those people who clicked-thru completed a specific action.
4. Bounce Rate
Measuring the bounce rate lets us know how many of our messages were successfully delivered by tracking both soft bounces (temporary delivery issues) and hard bounces (permanent issues with delivery.)
5. Unsubscribes
Tracking unsubscribes can provide invaluable information on the effectiveness of our marketing message. While a high number of unsubscribes might initially be viewed as a bad thing, it can be a good indicator that our marketing message is becoming more finely-tuned to our target audience.
6. Email Forwarding/Sharing Rate
It’s possible to learn how many advocates our brand might have by measuring the number of people who are sharing our marketing messages through social media or simply through email forwarding.
7. Engagement Over Time
By tracking this KPI, we can learn the time of day when our prospects have historically been the most receptive to our marketing messages.
8. Mobile Open and CTR Rate
These metrics are exactly like their desktop counterparts only, obviously, as they apply to mobile devices like phones and tablets.
9. Revenue Per Email
By tracking revenue per email, we can learn the ROI of an individual marketing message and, with that information, measure its success.
10. Revenue Per Subscriber
Looking at the information provided by this email marketing metric helps us learn exactly which demographics are providing the most value and make adjustments accordingly.
11. Overall Return on Investment
It might seem obvious why the information provided by this KPI is so invaluable, but we feel that it’s worth mentioning just how important it is to track this metric. With the data provided by tracking this metric, we can learn the overall return on investment that was brought about as a result of our campaign.
Use Metrics to Improve Success
Hopefully, by offering an overview of these email marketing metrics, we have been able to show you just how much invaluable insight they can provide to marketers.
By choosing just one or two of these metrics to focus in on, you will be able to gain valuable information and you will be better equipped to hone your email marketing skills so that you can more consistently achieve a positive result from your email marketing campaigns.
How DashboardFox Can Help
Most of your common email marketing systems will give you a great dashboard of email metrics, per campaign, and overall for your organization. That is typically enough for your team that actively works on email marketing. There are a lot of BI tools that will pitch you integrations with MailChimp, Hubspot, or other tools just to bring all those email metrics into a consolidated dashboard.
While we are all for consolidated views of data, just having a replica of metrics that exist inside your email marketing tool for executives to look at is eye candy. It doesn't add any value to the executives and it doesn't make the job of the marketing team any easier.
The real value of BI is to take that data and convert it into things that can help make decisions and drive the business.
That's where DashboardFox comes in. Our approach is different. We allow you to take data from multiple data sources and do data blending. To create dynamic formulas which can result in key performance metrics that are custom to your business. And we still keep it business user-friendly to create.
For example, how do the email marketing metrics we discussed above mirror fluctuations in sales pipeline or closed deals? Can you start to attribute specific email campaigns that may have driven an increase in sales? Of the clicks from email, do we see a corresponding increase in conversions on the website?
Business typically doesn't operate in silos and neither does business intelligence and metrics. Contact us to discuss your requirements and let's see how DashboardFox can help you.