Email marketing is an advertising tool that has become increasingly popular. According to Litmus, in 2022, 41.5% of brands, up from 78% in previous years, believe email marketing will be extremely important to the success of their business.
The use of email in business makes it possible to build a lasting mode of communication between consumers and companies to build loyalty over time and to increase sales. Moreover, according to a survey, emailing is still today the most profitable channel for the majority of companies.
“Email has an ability many channels don’t: creating valuable, personal touches—at scale.” – David Newman.
To achieve the objectives of email marketing, it is essential to monitor, evaluate, control and improve a certain number of indicators called “Key Performance Indicators” or “KPIs”. KPI for email marketing is used to assess and improve the performance of email marketing.
Marketing managers can use a wide range of metrics to make judgments, but only some KPIs offer insightful data that can be used to enhance your strategy. These crucial metrics can support you in cost-cutting, problem-solving, and subscriber satisfaction.
But which KPIs should you choose to measure the impact of your email marketing campaigns?
Discover the most useful indicators that will allow you to optimize the impact of your email marketing campaigns in this article.
Why measure the performance of email marketing campaigns?
Setting specific, pertinent goals will help you identify what is working and what isn’t in your email marketing. This is especially true for email marketing, where offering privacy the utmost value is crucial. Particularly, considering how important it is for businesses to keep customers who have shown interest in their brand, engaged, and subscribed.
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” – Peter Drucker.
To evaluate the success of your email marketing operations and completely comprehend how each campaign is doing both individually and collectively, key performance indicators should be tracked.
Because the target audience never has a consistent or straightforward customer journey or buying behavior, constant KPI prioritization helps in maintaining a high-level picture of data points. This not only enables you but also provides you with the chance to strategically change and advance.
6 Important KPIs for Email Marketing
KPIs can provide a quick way to see whether your campaigns are effective or not, as well as they give a clear possibility for optimization. KPIs give you the ability to assess the extent of your email marketing performance rather than forcing you to rush into the rat race of sending emails to tens of thousands of addresses with no evident results.
They enable you to do things like track the growth of prospects you add to your mailing list each week or determine whether your intended audience is opening your emails. Additionally, they will be able to inform you about the effectiveness of your call to action and the relevance of the topics you choose.
Consequently, you will be able to easily find your strong aspects to focus on as well as your weak points on which you must concentrate when you study the various KPIs. There are many other metrics, but we’ve narrowed down the list to the top 6 that will help your emailing operations’ return on investment.
“The use of KPIs is meant to improve and transform the organizational performance.” – Pearl Zhu
Deliverability Rate
This pertains to the extent of coverage of your email marketing campaign. In other words, it enables you to figure out what proportion of prospects considered your email to be “good.” To accomplish this, we determine the ratio of the total number of emails sent to the total number of acknowledgments received.
This ultimately provides the deliverability percentage with accuracy. The greater this proportion, the more robust the company’s email list. Even if you invest a lot of money into building your mailing list, poor deliverability will undermine your efforts and reduce your return on investment.
Your contact list’s percentage of inactive or fake email addresses is one potential factor in your low deliverability rate. The simplest way to resolve any questions you may have regarding this KPI is to consult a specialist who is knowledgeable about the various tools on the market.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is the proportion of emails that had a sending error in the context of email marketing. The goal of marketers is to achieve a low bounce rate. It is possible to distinguish between soft bounces (temporary errors) and hard bounces (permanent errors) to further the analysis of the bounce rate. Your bounce rate should, on average, be 2% or lower to be regarded as good.
The bounce rate is calculated as the number of undeliverable emails divided by the total number of emails sent.
Opening Rate
This information is crucial because it enables you to assess whether the content displayed prior to email opening effectively attracted the interest of your contacts in your message. Simply divide the number of times your email has been opened by the total number of emails sent to determine your open rate. Statistics show that 47% of recipients will open an email merely by reading the content.
This percentage will be less than 100% in 99% of cases. But in some rare circumstances, the opening rate might rise to 120% or 130%. Your open rate will be higher than 100% if some of your contacts forward your email to other contacts and everyone opens it. This is possible if you have a lesser number of recipients in your database.
Click Through Rate
You can assess the degree of engagement in your email using this data. This click-through rate is crucial since it will allow you to track how frequently your contacts have clicked on links. However, not all email marketing campaigns will benefit from this click-through rate. Statistics show that 10.29% is the average click-through rate across all industries.
This will certainly not be of any interest to be measured if the only objective of your email is to provide information and it does not include a link to your website, social media accounts, or any other website. The click-through rate is calculated by dividing the total number of links in your email by the total number of emails delivered.
Spam Rate
A complaint is the email that a user flags in his mailbox as spam. The acceptability of newsletters and other marketing emails is thus tracked using the complaint rate, often known as the spam rate. A high complaint rate increases the likelihood that the carriers will automatically classify your emails as spam.
Because your email address is targeted when one of your receivers flags an email as spam, this indicator is crucial. This specifically means that all upcoming emails from you will be delivered to the spam folder of the recipient. Naturally, this has a very negative effect and significantly lowers the opening rate of your emails.
Conversion Rate
The email conversion rate counts the number of recipients of your email who took action after opening it. Any activity that leads to a conversion, like completing a form, signing up for an event, or buying something. An email may have numerous conversion points, and each one needs to be tracked separately.
The conversion rate serves as the most reliable metric of email marketing effectiveness, consumer engagement, and revenue generation. It’s important to maintain the consumer journey in context. Although conversions frequently take time, your efforts will not be in vain. The consumer is usually bombarded with emails and ads. They occasionally require additional messaging to advance in the funnel, especially if it is personalized for them.
Conclusion
Giving your customers something of value will encourage them to return the favor, even though email marketing is constantly evolving. But you need to have an agile attitude if you want to measure your progress.
There are a number of marketing KPIs, and it is up to you to select them according to your objectives. Gather the right data and transform it into data visualization in order to effectively communicate information to decision-makers. While these KPIs for email marketing can serve as a starting point, you shouldn’t end there. Continue to experiment, learn, and develop.
