6 Email Metrics Every Marketer Needs to Know
With an intriguing subject line and a clear call-to-action, a good email campaign can nurture relationships with your customers and also generate new leads.
To expertly leverage your email marketing, use metrics to read your customers’ actions and preferences, making improvements accordingly.
Let’s pull back the curtain with these questions:
- How many people opened your email?
- How many people did the thing you asked them to do?
- Did your emails make it to the subscriber’s inbox?
- Did anyone choose to unsubscribe?
- Did anyone forward your email?
These basic questions can all be answered by taking a look at your email metrics, which are available in your email marketing platforms. Note: The terms might change slightly by platform, so read the metric descriptions carefully. All of the data is there for you, just make sure you know what you’re looking at!
Let’s start with the most basic of email marketing inquiries: How many people have opened your email?
1. Open Rate
Based on your industry, the expected amount of opens changes. Are you a non-profit? Get Response reports that an average open rate for your segment is 33.86%. Anything around that number denotes a good relationship with your customers. (And try to not take the 66% unopened rate personally. After all, you want your product to find its customers, and they might not have been a great fit.)
Pro Tip: Are your emails reaching that metric? If not, test your subject line. Randomly separate your recipient list and send two separate emails with differing subject lines, conducting your own A/B test. Check out the results to determine which subject line appeals to your audience.
2. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
What action are you asking your subscriber to take? Is it clear? This metric will tell you.
Every piece of communication with your customer should elicit a response. Your email needs to clearly and concisely ask for an action … over and over again, with words and images and (most importantly!) a stand-out call-t0-action button. The CTR metric will tell you how many click-throughs occurred out of all of your sent emails in one campaign.
The metric to reach here is around 4%. Are you reaching that goal? If not, ask a trusted colleague outside of your team to take a look at your email and make some suggestions. Chances are your CTA isn’t as clear as you thought.
Need more help with marketing? Check out 3 Proven Email Marketing Platforms to Make Campaigns Easy.
3. Click-Through Open Rate (CTOR)
It might seem like we’re splitting hairs, but this metric is important.
Out of the emails that were opened, how many clicked through to our CTA? For non-profit, Get Response reports that 11.48% of your opened emails should convert to clicks.
What if your CTOR is very low, but your open rate is high? Your call-to-action needs tweaking. Your customers want to hear from you, they just aren’t clear about what you’re asking of them.
If your open rate is low but your CTOR is high, these metrics are clearly telling you to improve your subject line. See how helpful metrics can be?
4. Bounce Rates
Maintaining strong customer relationships is critical to email marketing. Platforms include varying degrees of CRM (customer relationship management), and the database should be kept as clean as possible. One metric to watch is bounce rates.
A soft bounce is typically the result of a full inbox or a too-large email, or a server glitch. It’s innocent and will likely resolve itself.
Hard bounces come when an email is sent to a nonexistent address. It can be an innocent mistake made on your opt-in form, or it can be a fake email given to make it past the prompts on your site. While there’s not much you can do about the latter, you can solve the former by including a two-step verification on your forms.
5. Unsubscribe Rate
Non-profits have some of the lowest unsubscribe rates in the industry: 0.18%. Generally speaking, if your customers have subscribed, they want to hear from you. This is good news!
But opt-outs are a fact of marketing, and as you know personally, the reasons for unsubscribing are as varied as your individual customers. You can pull back the curtain a bit by setting up a query post-unsubscribe and ask them to share their reasoning.
Pro Tip: An opt-out or unsubscribe link is a requirement of the CAN-SPAM act. Don’t fret! Your email marketing platform will provide one in the footer of your emails.
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6. Forwarding Rate
It’s nice to know you’re valued.
It’s great endorsement when a subscriber shares your content with a friend, via email or social media.
Take note: Platforms vary on this metric. Some track email forwards and some calculate clicks on the “share this” button on your email. Either way, props to you!
Your email marketing platform will track these any many other metrics for you. Familiarize yourself with the options and then start watching the metrics, making strategic changes along the way to increase opens and conversions.
What other metrics do you watch to track the success of you email campaigns? Share your answers in the comment section below. We’d love to hear from you!