Email Marketing Metrics for Effective Campaigns

Email marketing requires your time, your effort, and your money.  Like anything else that requires such precious resources, you need to know if your emails are producing results.  As a digital marketer, analyzing what happens after your emails go out is the most critical part of your campaign. Your email sends contain invaluable insight into what is resonating with your leads and customers and adopting a data-driven email marketing strategy is the best way you can ensure that your time, effort, and money are as impactful as possible. By consistently measuring and analyzing campaign performance, you can fine-tune and optimize your strategy to deliver value and build relationships.

But what metrics should you be monitoring? And what benchmarks should you be looking for?

At TopLine, when we start working with a client, there are a handful of key metrics that we set up and monitor to inform what strategies are needed to be effective.  Once in place, we work with you to review and interpret them to help you understand what changes can be made to improve contact engagement and overall email marketing ROI.

Email Marketing Checklist

1. Unsubscribe/ Opt-Out Rate

The unsubscribe or opt-out rate is the percentage of recipients that click on the unsubscribe link included in your email.  It is a great way to gauge the overall health of your marketing lists.

For each email campaign, the ideal unsubscribe rate is 1% or lower.

If your unsubscribe rate is consistently higher than 1%, this is an indication that there may be an issue with your list segmentation and/or your content. A consistently high unsubscribe rate is not only bad for your reputation with your contacts, but it also negatively affects your email sender reputation, which means your message will end up in spam folders, and certain email providers may temporarily or permanently ban (aka “blacklist”) you from sending emails.

To reduce unsubscribe rates, we work with you to make sure we understand who your segments are and help you identify and build content that matches your message to those segments.

2. Bounce Rate

Bounce rates measure the percentage of time your emails get “bounced” back to you. Just like snail mail, when a message cannot be delivered to the intended recipient for whatever reason, the email is sent back to the sender with a notification of its bounced status.  When an email bounces, no one sees your content.

For each email campaign, the bounce rate should never exceed 10%.

Along with the unsubscribe rate, the bounce rate is also a key metric in determining the overall health of your marketing lists, and consistently high bounce rates can get you blacklisted from sending emails.  To help our clients avoid the disruption and pain of potential blacklisting, we offer our email validation service that indicates if an email can be delivered before you send it. We strongly recommend that a list, especially new and old lists, be validated before a campaign.

3. Open Rate

The open rate is the percentage of recipients who opened your email.  It is a fundamental measure that indicates the effectiveness of all the different parts of your strategy: segmentation, frequency, timing, content, etc.  The open rate will tell you if your contacts feel your message may be relevant to them.

While open rates tend to vary by industry, an open rate of 20% or higher is generally considered to be good.

Understanding and then improving open rates can be tricky because, as just mentioned, multiple, intertwined factors determine it. To understand what it is telling you, you first need to break out and measure the individual contributors and then identify how they are contributing to one another.  This approach will help you understand what adjustments to make, and we often see a 200-300+% increase in open rates, depending on the different segments and industries of your contacts.

4. Click-Through Rate

The click-through rate tells you what percentage of recipients clicked on a link in your email.  While the open rate tells you if contacts think your message may be relevant, the click-through rate is confirmation the content is relevant to them and is proof that your strategy is working.

A click-through rate of 10% or higher is generally considered to be good.

Many different aspects of your email body contribute to the click-through rate, including the copy, the overall design, the qualities of your CTAs (calls to action), and your target segments. Just as with the open rate, examining the qualities of an email at a granular and holistic level will lead you to the insights you can use to refine your strategy and deliver content that creates clicks.

Final Thoughts

Your leads and customers are bombarded with a flurry of marketing emails each day. To stand out from the noise, you need to create emails that take their behaviors and preferences into account. By carefully assessing email analytics, you can create more compelling emails that will help you achieve your goals.

At TopLine Results, we take the time to understand what your marketing goals are and work with you to set up easy-to-maintain campaign metric tracking in simple, user-friendly formats. Moreover, we have the experience to help you make sense of what the data is telling you and improve your results.

If you’d like to learn more about our approach to email marketing,  let us know here or call us directly at 800-880-1960.