The Importance of Email Marketing Metrics

One of the best benefits of email marketing is that it delivers measurable metrics. To run a successful email marketing campaign, you need to monitor and understand email statistics such as Open Rate, Click-Through Rate (CTR), Bounce Back rate etc. Understanding these metrics will allow you to improve your email marketing campaign and achieve better results.

1. Basic Email Metrics you should evaluate in each email campaign:

Open Rate – that is the total number of emails opened (in HTML format) divided by total emails delivered/distributed.

Click-Thru Rate (CTR) – calculated as the number of unique clicks on links in the email divided by the number of emails opened. It basically means how many people interacted with your email.

Bounce Rate – represents the total number of emails that were not delivered and bounced back. There are several reason why the email was rejected such as the email address is no longer valid, a server filtered the email out, or the recipient’s mailbox was full and over quota.

Based on your unique email marketing campaigns objectives, you can measure more advanced statistics such as:

• Number of Emails Open based on Region/Country
• Number of Click-Thru based on Region/Country
• Number of Sales based on Region/Country/referring URL
• Conversion (Click to Sales)
• Rate Total Revenue per campaign
• Return on Investment (ROI) per campaign

2. What metrics you should focus on?

This really depends on your campaigns objectives. Open rate is a very important indicator to some extent however to get a better picture of your campaign performance, it should be analyzed in combination with other metrics – such as click through rate (CTR) and click to action rate (conversion rate).

Why is that? Because CTR and conversion rate are able to tell you how many recipients took an action you wanted them to take, such as purchased your product, signed up to your newsletter, downloaded the whitepaper etc. Whereas the open rate will only tell you how many people read your email. So in order to measure the effectiveness of your message, you need to go beyond the open rate down to the action level.

3. How to boost the Click-Through Rate (CTR)?

Savvy email marketers not only want to get the email opened and read but also want to know how many people clicked through (measured by CTR) and they want this number to be as high as possible. There are few key points in each email you should review because they critically influence the open rate and CTR. Those are:

Today’s readers are busy people and it usually takes them just few seconds to decide whether to read your message or delete it. So construct your message carefully and monitor your email statistics to find out what works best for your business.