With so many statistics about the power of email, how do you measure your own email marketing success?
You’ve probably seen the massive lists of stats around the internet. And while these can help shape your strategy, they don’t do well to show you how your efforts are performing.
This post should give you some next steps to start determining the performance of your email marketing programs.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a part of digital marketing that deals with the use of email as a medium of building relationships with your customers. It’s out of this relationship that your subscribers permit you to send promotional emails to them directly.
How to measure email marketing success
So how do you measure the success of your email marketing?
Set goals.
Every email marketing campaign needs to have goals. Your email marketing goals will ultimately show you whether your email marketing is successful or not. Your marketing goals will also help you set your KPIs. Some common email marketing goals include:
- Brand awareness
- Sales
- Customer engagement
- Lead nurturing
These are just some of the many goals you can set for your email marketing campaigns.
Define your KPIs.
Key performance indicators (or KPIs) are a type of performance measurement. They’re measurable indicators that show how your email marketing is performing. Examples of some KPIs you can use to judge the performance of your email marketing include:
Deliverability
Deliverability measures the success of your emails reaching their intended inboxes. Your campaign is only useful if people are receiving your emails, so this is an important KPI to measure.
Open rate
Open rate is a metric that measures the percentage of people who opened your emails. Higher email opens are an indicator that your audience finds your emails relevant.
The average open rate across all industries is around 18%. However, this isn’t the figure you should benchmark with. Instead, try to outperform your average open rate.
Click-through rate
The click-through rate is the percentage of people who clicked a link in your email. It’s usually expressed as a percentage out of those who received your email. This is an important metric to track, as it shows you how many of your subscribers are interested in your offer.
Conversion rate
The success of your email marketing is seen in the number of people who fulfill the goal of your campaign. This is what’s commonly referred to as the conversion rate. To know how many people convert, it’s essential to track your email CTAs. Using platforms like Google Analytics or other data integrations will help you track your clicks through to purchases (if your goal is to make a sale).
Measure and interpret your data.
Measuring and understanding these metrics isn’t as difficult as it sounds. All you have to do is go to your email marketing platform’s dashboard and explore your campaign insights.
Here’s how it reporting looks in Campaign Monitor.
Depending on the goals of your campaign, these metrics will give you all the information you need to determine the success of your email marketing.
Does it really matter?
Measuring the success of your email marketing definitely matters. For one, it’ll help you discover where your campaign’s weak spots are, and knowing this will give you insight into where you can improve to achieve better results.
What now?
Now that you know how to measure the success of your email marketing, there’s no more need for you to guess the performance of your email marketing campaign’s success.
Need more tips on how to measure the success of your email marketing campaigns? Check out this list of metrics every email marketer needs to know.